Plane Crash Diaries

. This is episode 45 – the Pitot-Tube Loving Mud-Dauber Wasp and Birgenair Flight 301, an episode that follows an email from one of my listeners, Dr Athayde Tonhasca. HE is a Brazilian entomologist working for Scottish Heritage in the United Kingdom.

He’s going to help me tell the story of Berginair Flight 301 which crashed in February 1996.

Wasps are fascinating creatures, many are solitary and their nest building skills are legendary. This episode is all about the dangers of these remarkable creatures and how they’ve affected global aviation.
Birgenair Flight 301 was a chartered flight by Turkish-managed Birgenair partner Alas Nacionales from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic to Frankfurt in Germany. It was on a two stop route, first in the Canadian town of Gander, followed by a second across the Atlantic in Berlin, Germany.
The aircraft was a 12-year-old Boeing 757-225, registered as TC-GEN, which had been stationed at Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic for 25 days.
The flight was originally scheduled to be flown with a Boeing 767, but maintenance problems on the original 767 prevented its use, so just 2 ½ hours before Flight 301 was due to take off, TC-GEN - the Boeing 757 was substituted, and a new crew was assigned.
The Boeing took off at 23:42 local on 6th February 1996 for the first leg of the flight, heading north easterly out over the Atlantic. It was a black hole situation, completely dark, no clear sight of the horizon. This was going to compound the challenges facing the pilots.
At 23:47 AST, the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) sounded - eight seconds later the plane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of 220 knots.
All 189 occupants were killed, and the Boeing was destroyed on impact.
Search and Rescue teams were mobilised.
The Dominican Republic General Directorate of Civil Aviation investigated the accident and quickly came to the conclusion that the pitot tube was behind the catastrophe.
They also concluded that the probable cause of the obstruction was likely to have been mud from a small insect that built a nest inside the pitot tube during the three weeks it was on the ground in Puerto Plata.
Pilots and operators knew about that risk.

Welcome back to Plane Crash Diaries with me, your host and pilot, Des Latham. Episode 44 and we’re exploring more bizarre stories of pilot suicide with the tragedy of A10 Captain Craig Button and the Kamikaze Pink Porn Pilot, Mitsuyatsu Maeno.
A listener called Clifford who’s a SouthWest Airlines pilot suggested the topic for this episode and it’s taken me a year to get around to it – the curious case of Captain Craig Button. The incident has been called one of the most puzzling in US Air Force history. We’ll also hear about an off the wall weird example of pilot suicide in the second half, Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno who dressed up in Kamikazi gear than tried to kill a Yakuza crime boss with a loaded Piper Cherokee.
I decided to look at these two in particular because of how cosmology, religion, and extremism can hide in plain sight in someone who may be sitting next to you on the flight deck. Neither were examples of commercial aviation-linked suicides, but they are a warning to all of us to keep an eye out for folks who may harbour dark secrets.
Let’s start It on April 2nd, 1997. Captain Craig Button was leading a three plane A-10 Thunderbolt Warthog formation conducting a live-weapons training mission from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.
Button inexplicably broke formation. He flew 800 miles off course, and zigzagged across Arizona and Colorado the plane obviously being handled in a controlled fashion, maneuvering through bad weather, and in places, changing altitude.
Button was tracked by radar, until he flew into Gold Dust Peak near Vail in Colorado, hitting the mountain just 100 feet below the summit. Apart from the mystery of what caused the accident, there was also a small matter of four 500 pound MK82 bombs which were never found despite extensive searches. It appeared he dropped them over the desert somewhere, like trees falling in a forest, unseen but as you’ll hear in a minute, not unheard.
What caused this highly respected and skilled instructor to apparently commit suicide, which is what the Air Force concluded had happened. Unrequited love perhaps? Confusion over his role as a fighter pilot? The missing motive and missing ordnance were equally baffling. A search and rescue began immediately.
The wreckage was finally spotted on 20 April 1997 by a Colorado Army National Guard helicopter crew, 18 days after Button went missing,on the northwest face of Gold Dust Peak at about 13,200 feet. Because the crash took place at such a high elevation during spring, most of the bits were buried under deep snow. Like the mysterious flight MH370, the pilot here had picked a spot on earth that was extremely difficult to access.
Let’s move onto the second example of the pilot suicide took place On March 23, 1976. This involved love of a very different kind.
Japanese porn actor and pilot Mitsuyasu Maeno staged a kamikaze-style attack, crashing a Piper PA-28 Cherokee into the Tokyo home of right-wing figure Yoshio Kodama. Maeno was dressed in a World War II Kamikazi pilot uniform and died on impact. He was the only fatality.
The attack was motivated by rage over what was called the Lockheed bribery scandal. Yoshio Kodama was a notorious political fixer, Yakuza-connected gangster, and key figure in corrupt business practices..

This is episode 43, and I thought instead of taking a closer look at the plethora of pilot suicides, another topic is heating up fast. The dangers of lithium-based batteries, lithium polymers, now playing probably on your wrist theatre, or perhaps in your hand, or gauging your heartbeat, monitoring the baby, inside your laptop, powering your GPS and your vaping device.

They’re everywhere.

Lithium has revolutionised our lives – and simultaneously poses a risk to aviation. The number of incidents of recharging battery packs and phones overheating is growing by the week. I am certain that the next major airline fire is going to be caused by a battery burn. And I’m not alone in this concern, IATA has just published data which revealed that 83% of pax carry a phone, 60% a laptop and 44% a power bank. So what you say.

It’s what they found about what pax know about that dangers that’s of concern. While 93% of travelers consider themselves knowledgeable on the rules for carrying lithium-powered devices, half of those surveyed or 50% incorrectly believe it’s OK to pack small lithium-powered devices in checked luggage, 45% incorrectly believe it’s OK to pack power banks in checked luggage and 33% incorrectly believe that there are no power limits on power banks or spare batteries. Most spare lithium-ion batteries and power banks are limited to 100 Wh without special approval.

This covers standard phones, tablets, and most consumer power banks while batteries between 101 Wh and 160 Wh - such as larger laptop batteries, professional camera/video batteries, or massive power banks are liimited to two spare batteries per person and require airline approval. Batteries over 160 Wh are banned in either carry-on or checked baggage, with limited exceptions only for certain mobility aids like wheelchairs.
Airlines are collecting data through the Thermal Runaway Incident Program and we now know that across the world, an average of two flights a week have reported thermal runaways and one in five of these events led to a diverted landing. Crucially, we also discovered that two out of five passengers are packing rechargeable batteries in checked luggage.

That is tantamount to playing Russian roulette.
Back during these days, authorities underestimated the dangers – that was until the terrible UPS Airlines Flight 6 disaster of 2010. UPS Flight six was a scheduled international cargo flight operated by the parcel service which departed Dubai on September 3, 2010 heading to Cologne in Germany.

This is episode 42, and we’re diving into a particular category of aviation accidents — those that happen right at the beginning of a pilot’s journey. We’re talking about ab initio training mishaps.
Ab initio, Latin for “from the beginning,” refers to a training path designed for aspiring pilots who start with zero flight time. Nothing. Not a minute logged, not a system diagram understood. These courses take students from ground zero to the right-hand seat of a commercial flight deck — through a tightly structured mix of theory, simulator time, and real-world flying.
They’re intense and sometimes quite fast. And they aim to do two things: produce skilled, airline-ready pilots and identify those who should probably find another career.
Many of these programmes are tied directly to airlines, which means you’re taught from the outset to fly their way — their SOPs, their ethos, their cockpit culture. That brings clear advantages. The pathway is laid out: from the classroom to the cockpit, without the detours of fragmented, school-hopping training. For many, there’s financial backing too — covering tuition, even living costs — opening doors for those who’d otherwise never afford to fly.
There’s also the camaraderie. Like a military intake, you form close bonds under pressure, guided by seasoned instructors and surrounded by peers. And at the end, a job may be waiting — conditional on success.
But it’s not all lift and no drag.
Freedom? Limited. You’re often bonded to the airline for years — and leaving early can come with steep penalties. Career flexibility? Not much. Your training is airline-specific, and if you decide to fly charter or head bush, you may be back at square one.
Contrary to the doomsaying of many veteran aviators, the accident rate during ab initio flight training in the United States has fallen by close to 50% — measured per flight hour - it shows between 2000 and 2019, the number of fatal training accidents almost halved. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Air Safety Institute has the data to back it up.

In the early 2000s, the accident rate hovered around 0.49 per 100,000 flying hours. By 2009, that fell to 0.39. By 2019, the rate dipped to 0.26 per 100,000 hours — a substantial decline.
The top three causes of fatal training accidents haven’t changed much over time. They are, in order:

1. Loss of control in flight
2. Midair collisions
3. Controlled Flight Into Terrain — CFIT — the old nemesis flight into the granite cloud.

Episode 41 is about substance abuse, technocrats behaving badly, sub-standard crew training and fatal attractions to nicotine and C H 3 C H 2 OH — methylethyl alcohol, otherwise known as hootch, or in South Africa, dop.

This is an episode that’s longer than usual, with quite a lot of ATC sound thrown in later. I hope you find it useful - remember this series is all about aviation safety which ironically is one of the positive results of a catastrophe.

But only if we institute the improvements — and take note as aviators and administrators.

Our first example of a legal drug causing a commercial airliner to crash is EgyptAir Flight 804 which took off from Paris’ De Gaulle Airport heading to Cairo International on 19th May 2016. As is the case in many of these accidents, cutting corners when it came to snag reporting caught up with everyone involved. And the geopolitical high jinks and obscurantism caught up with Bureaucrats too.

This was no idle fiddle, an Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean north of Alexandria killing all 56 pax, 7 crew and 3 security staff aboard on that day. B

In our second example, cutting the corners on training, more unresolved snags and alcohol caused the Aeroflot flight 821 disaster - a Boeing that crashed while the confused pilots were trying to land at Perm Airport in Russia, killing all 88 on board.

Let’s kick off with the EgyptAir flight 804, an Airbus A320 registration SU-GCC serial number 2088 which had picked up mechanical snafus on four previous flights before the accident, according to automated messages analysed after the crash. EgyptAir pilots and the airline’s technical center in Cairo had ignored those errors. The Airbus was 13 years old, logging 48052 flight hours in 20773 flight cycles since its manufacture in 2003.

This is one of the cases of a one error after another — and then one too many.
The Airbus took off from de Gaule Airport at 23:09 local on the night of 19th May 2016 - bound for Cairo. It never made it. At 2h30 UTC the plane disappeared from radar while flying at 37,000 feet in clear weather 280 kilometers north of Alexandria.
Finally, the world learned the Egyptian pilots had indeed been battling a fire in the cockpit. It was this that had caused the plane to spiral and break up, not a bomb, and the Egyptians knew it all along. The French BEA had been brazenly colluding with the Egyptians and hiding the truth.Now for our second example, and its a dangerous dalliance with alcohol that tipped the balance from incident to accident.

Aeroflot 821 Boeing crashed on 14 September 2008, on approach to Perm International Airport in Russia, at 5:10 local time - it was dark and cloudy. All 82 passengers and six crew members were killed. Among the passengers was Russian Colonel General Gennady Troshev, Vladimir Putin’s advisor and commander of the North Caucasus Military District during the Second Chechen War. But for once, Putin was not fingered in the suspicious death of a comrade which comes as a surprise.

The Air Crash investigation unveiled a litany of bad habits.