Why the RAT Changes Everything – Air India 171 Update – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.all right friends i promised you we'd come back to you as as soon as possible as soon as we got some new information about this tragic accident over in India and some new video has emerged that's changed my analysis of this accident in particular and let me recap for you where I started on this and basically there's three camps that everybody is still in about what 48 hours almost after the original accident the theory number one was that there was some sort of dual engine failure and then the backup to that was it was either a bird strike or it was some sort of fuel contamination that led to that dual engine failure that was theory number one theory number two was the pilots didn't have the flaps set properly for takeoff in other words the flaps were up and as they ran down the runway they got a little bit of air but uh eventually the airplane just kind of waddled down and crashed because the flaps weren't set properly the third theory and the one that I was leaning to the most and let me just say leaning to uh I wasn't firmly in this camp but I was leaning towards it was they uh had the flap set properly for takeoff when they rotated everything was normal at the time that the pilot flying would ask for gear up the other pilot mistakenly grabbed the flap handle and prematurely raise the flaps that was at the time the thing that seemed most evident to me because the landing gear stayed down for the entire duration short as it would be for this flight and the there was no evidence out of the engines that was there any sort of failure no fire no sparks no smoke coming out of the engines a real head scratcher on that front and so I thought maybe it was simply they grabbed the wrong handle and prematurely raised the flaps i was leaning heavily into that department i'm going to change my analysis now because of this new video and it's based on the original video that all of us watched and we saw two main videos the one where the airplane was running down the runway and then rotated and took off and you saw it crash in the distance the other one was a video that was taken from kind of a rooftop or a window where the airplane came from left to right and then descended down out of the screen and then you saw the fireball there i'm going to show you that video in its original form now what do I mean by that the video that we all saw and every major news network on the planet went with was a video of a video and the quality was extremely poor the original that was presumably taken from an iPhone or some sort of cell phone is much sharper it's not a terrific video by any means but it's much sharper than the video of the other video so what happened was some cameraman was in front of a screen watching the video play and you can see him at the very end of it you can actually see his shadow and you can hear people talking in the background so the audio is not very good and the visual is not very good the original is going to show us something that's going to change this whole thing let me run the video that I'm talking about and you take a look at it and then I'll talk about it after it runs [Music] can you hear how crisp that is you didn't hear that you didn't hear the actual crash on the original video you could see it but you didn't hear it why cuz there was people talking in the background this original is much sharper now you're looking at it going "Well I've seen that a bunch of times." You haven't seen it this clearly a bunch of times now I want to run it again and I want you we're going to zoom in on something and I'm going to show you something and explain it because this is a total game changer right there my friends take a look we've circled it for you now a lot of people have been talking about the theory that the rat had deployed what's a rat it's a ram air turbine it deploys on many airplanes have it 787 has it trip 7 has it uh the rat is basically just behind the the wing on the right side of the airplane there's a little door that holds it in and it looks like a little Evanrude motor it's a little twobladed prop and the purpose of the ram air turbine is to provide electrical and hydraulic pressure for the aircraft in an extreme emergency on the 787 in particular there's three things that will deploy the RAT and it deploys automatically a massive electrical uh failure a massive hydraulic failure or a dual engine failure so any one of those three things will cause that rat to deploy so up to this point all of the theories that we've had were based on maybe one bit of solid evidence but not two or maybe one and a half but you know it's hard to go with a theory when you've only got like one thing to go on i'm going to give you three or more for why I think the rat deployed and why I think this was a dual engine failure i'm firmly in that camp now number one is right here take a look at your screen in the middle of the circle you see kind of a it looks like a protrusion on the on the belly of the aircraft and I'm not trying to be salacious with this it looks like a nipple at the bottom of the airplane all right just underneath that you see a little gray dot it almost looks like an artifact on the screen that little gray dot is the rat this is visual confirmation that the rat deployed what is that that protrusion underneath the airplane that's the door that opened to allow the rat to come down and you can see it here you can see it very vividly on this screen it's not the best it's kind of grainy still it's at least one bit of the puzzle here so that's evidence number one now evidence number two is with our ears all right because a rat makes a very distinctive sound and in that original video the audio was so bad you couldn't really catch it but in this uh the the one that they were showing to us the original one it's much more clear and it sounds like a a prop airplane going by or a real high-pitched squeal uh because it's a two-bladed prop and it's basically spinning at the speed of sound to to produce the uh the uh energy the electrical and the hydraulic that it needs to so let me play this i'm going to put it on a loop i think we're going to listen to it three times listen for that that high-pitched prop sound remember this is a jet it's not a prop as it goes by listen [Music] okay it sounded like it if you weren't looking at it it sounded like a single engine prop airplane just flew by you might look up and expect to see a little Sesna going by and in fact it is a little bitty Sesna it's a little bitty twobladed prop that's spinning uh as fast as it possibly can now the RAT was originally designed and it's on all these airplanes as a back the last resort the absolute last resort it's assuming that there's going to be basically a dual engine failure at altitude let's say you're at 30,000 ft both engines flame out for some reason you start descending down you're looking for a suitable field you're out of hydraulics and you're out of electric because both of your engines have stopped running maybe the auxiliary power unit isn't running but it's not going to get you any thrust either and so let's assume that's out at that point you've got to have some sort of electrical so you can talk on the radios so you can have some shoot some sort of an approach and get some sort of instrumentation in front of you and then you have to have some sort of hydraulics to still fly the airplane it gives you the minimum of all of those categories that I just mentioned but it does work but it's meant for the airplane to kind of cruise down now and find a place to land it's It's not designed for an airplane that's at 4 or 500 ft and loses all power there's no time to get the engines reit benefit to them except it's evidence for us that it was a dual engine failure most likely could it have been an electrical issue could have been a hydraulic issue yeah it could have been either one of those but I think the fact that the airplane is now just kind of mushing out of the sky uh gives us the idea that it was a dual engine failure but we can hear it so there's confirmation number two we've got the visual that we can see the rat deployed we can hear it with our ears and let me just give you one more confirmation on that because there was a Japan Air uh 787 that landed uh in an emergency with the rat deployed so you can hear one cuz you can see this clearly so let me run that for you and listen to it [Music] hear that sound it sounds just like a like a World War II buzz boy going right by az it sounds like a little Sesna and so we can see clearly on that airplane the rat is deployed this one the Air India not so much but it's it's grainy and it's in a distance so you've got the oral right you've got the visual grainy as it might be what is the third clue here that they had a dual engine failure the third is this the eyewitness report you go wait a minute what what do you mean eyewitness report there was one survivor from this crash unbelievably miraculous that this guy he literally walked away from the crash he's been confirmed it wasn't a hoax he was in seat 11A he was right by an emergency exit a few rows in front of the spar of the wing of the aircraft i think that spar saved his life cuz that's the strongest uh heaviest part of the airplane that's probably what went took the impact when they hit those buildings uh he was in his seat he he didn't go unconscious he gets out of he opens up the the door and he jumps out of the airplane right and he's literally walking to the hospital after that uh they've talked to him and he said be just prior to the crash he heard a loud bang and the lights flickered on the inside of the airplane now that bit of evidence all by itself it's not all that compelling because you go the guy's been through a really traumatic thing and you know he could have imagined it it could have been he hit something on the way down the airplane did that's the the most unreliable an eyewitness but we need to combine that now with the visual on the rat being deployed the oral that we heard the rat when it went by briefly as it was and now we've got a guy saying he heard a loud bang and the lights flickered what would cause that the deployment of the rat and then it's going to take over electrical and hydraulic and as it does that the lights in the airplane would flicker so there's the third bit of evidence what's 3.5 or the fourth i've heard but I haven't heard the ATC audio yet but I've heard reports that the captain got out a Mayday call and when he did his Mayday call he said they were losing thrust or something to that effect so that could be a possible fourth evidence that they had a dual engine failure that gives us a tremendous amount of clarity now at this point so I'm going to put at least in second place the idea that the the co-pilot raised the flaps prematurely that might end up in third place on the theories i'm solidly now in the camp that they had some sort of dual engine failure the rat is deployed you can hear the rat you've got eyewitness testimony that something loud banged underneath the airplane it was probably the rat with all of those things um being said uh I think it's pretty clear it gives us a lot of clarity let me put it that way it gives us a lot of clarity and at the same time it sends us completely black back to square one why is that cuz we have no idea why both engines on a 787 would flame out right after rotate no clue whatsoever uh there is a thing called um uh Aviation Herald they came out with a report now over in India their initial report and you can see it at their website it's Aviation Herald is what it's called you can see their report they ruled out a few things one of them was bird strike because they said there was no they inspected the runway and there was no dead birds on the runway we can run that one out they also said though that they didn't think it was a dual engine failure which I think they probably got that wrong at this point and they also said they didn't think it was pilot error so I think two out of three from that report are pretty accurate the dual engine failure goes right up now to priority number one or theory number one with the four bits of evidence I've given you today um folks I hope that the blackbox data tells us why both engines would fail at the same time but I have no clue fuel contamination it's one of the possibilities but you know what there's there's more and I'm going to leave the door wide open to what else could have happened to cause both engines on a 787 to flame out uh at the same time it's a real headscratcher at this point we've got some clarity though today on what uh actually happened based on four hard bits of information thanks for hanging with me on this one folks there's probably more to come now you know i'm Captain Steve