Final Boarding Call

A swordfishing boat is three days from home when it sails into a collision of weather systems that meteorologists say happens once every fifty to a hundred years. Six men are aboard. Two hundred miles away, a sailboat crew is about to be pulled from the same ocean by a rescue swimmer running on fumes. One boat makes it home. Drawing on the Coast Guard's own investigation, join Alice and Zach for t...

The world’s largest passenger jet climbs out of Singapore on a routine training flight. Four minutes later, an explosion inside one engine sends debris tearing through the wing — and for several minutes, a fire burns inside it that not one person flying the plane ever knows about. Join Alice and Zach for the story of five pilots, one badly damaged A380, and the manufacturing flaw the size of a few...

Six minutes after takeoff from Miami, a routine climb turns into a fight for control that lasts less than four minutes. Join Alice and Zach as they trace a chain of small decisions — made in a maintenance hangar weeks earlier — that put something dangerous where nobody expected it, and the regulator that had been warned about exactly this kind of failure eight years before it happened. Sources Air...

A brand-new Boeing 737 is thirty-four minutes into a routine flight from Jakarta to Singapore when its cockpit voice recorder goes dark — while the aircraft is flying straight and level in clear skies. Minutes later, the flight data recorder follows. Then the plane leaves cruising altitude entirely. Two official investigations examined the same wreckage. They did not agree on what happened, or why...

A cargo plane climbs out of one of the most dangerous airports on earth, carrying nothing but mail. Somewhere below, armed men are waiting for exactly this kind of target. Join Alice and Zach for the story of the only known case in aviation history where a large airliner lost every hydraulic control system to a missile strike — and the crew found a way to fly it anyway. Sources Aircraft accident r...

What happens when the safety device meant to save your life becomes the weapon that kills you? Discover how a cost-cutting decision to use explosive chemicals, a 15-year corporate cover-up involving destroyed evidence and manipulated test data, and catastrophic regulatory failures turned millions of ordinary cars into ticking time bombs. Learn why a 17-year-old's "fender bender" became a crime sce...

On a clear evening in the Brazilian Amazon, a routine forty-minute hop between two small airports turns into hours of confusion, radio silence, and a jet with a shrinking fuel supply over some of the most remote rainforest on Earth. Join Alice and Zach for the story of the people aboard Varig Flight 254 — the ones flying it, and the ones who had to save themselves after it went down. Sources Final...

Seven days after Pan Am Flight 103 came down, forensic scientists confirmed what investigators already suspected: this was a bomb. That answer opened a much harder question. Join Alice and Zach for the reconstruction of a Boeing 747 inside a five-acre shed, the false lead that pointed at the wrong country, a pair of trousers with an order number stamped on them, and the green circuit board half th...

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was seven minutes into level cruise over southern Scotland when the cockpit voice recorder captured a single loud sound and stopped. What happened over the next three seconds is one of the most precisely reconstructed events in aviation history — and almost none of it came from the black boxes. Join Alice and Zach for the story of the people aboard Clipper M...

A single-engine plane is over the Atlantic between the Bahamas and the Florida coast when the pilot goes silent at the controls. In the back sits a 39-year-old flooring salesman who has never touched an airplane, a magnetic compass, a friend frozen with fear, and a voice on the radio who wasn't supposed to be working that day. Join Alice and Zach for the story of a routine flight home that becomes...

On the morning of November 12, 2001, ninety seconds after leaving JFK, an Airbus A300 bound for Santo Domingo came apart in clear air over Queens. All 260 people aboard and five more on the ground were killed. In a city nine weeks removed from September 11th, there seemed to be only one possible explanation — and the FBI, the NTSB, and an entire grieving neighborhood spent the next three years fin...

A Czech gunner is shot down in no man's land in the winter of 1939 and finds something alive in an abandoned farmhouse. What follows is the story of how a German Shepherd puppy crossed occupied France, went to war, and was decorated for it — a dog who, according to the paperwork, was never there at all. Join Alice and Zach for a story about loyalty, an escape that happened twice, and a war record...

A Boeing 727 lifts its nose on a clear Texas morning, and the rest of the plane refuses to follow. Twenty-two seconds later it's a burning wreck in a field a mile from the runway. Join Alice and Zach as they unravel how a routine takeoff at America's third-busiest airport went catastrophically wrong — a disaster that looked at first like an engine failure, then like a freak mechanical fault, and t...

On a warm July night in 2013, patrons at a popular Quebec bar heard the screech of metal on metal as an unmanned train barreled toward their town at highway speeds. What followed was a cascade of explosions that turned half the downtown into an inferno, killing 47 people and exposing a corporate culture that valued profits over lives. Discover how a cheap repair, inadequate training, and regulator...

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished over the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people aboard. For two years, the world could only speculate about what happened to a state-of-the-art Airbus A330 during a routine overnight crossing. Join Alice and Zach as they explore how a brief sensor malfunction triggered a catastrophic chain of confusion — and why, seventeen years later, the question of who be...

A Boeing 737 lands in Okinawa after a routine one-hour hop from Taiwan. The flight is over. The engines are off, the passengers are reaching for their bags — and then someone sees smoke curling from under the right wing. Within minutes the aircraft is an inferno. Join Alice and Zach for the story of a plane that survived every dangerous phase of flight, only to erupt into flames while parked at th...

On March 16, 1962, a military charter flight carrying 93 Army Rangers vanished over the Pacific Ocean during a secret mission to Vietnam. Despite one of the largest searches in aviation history, no trace of the aircraft or its 107 occupants was ever found. Join Alice and Zach as they explore how a mission so classified that soldiers had to leave their wedding rings and dog tags at home became one...

On October 1, 2015, the cargo ship SS El Faro steamed directly into the path of Hurricane Joaquin and vanished with all 33 crew members aboard. Join Alice and Zach as they unravel how a routine "milk run" between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico became America's worst maritime disaster in decades. Discover the deadly combination of outdated weather data, corporate pressure, ignored warnings, and mecha...

When a mysterious package in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444 suddenly detonates at 30,000 feet, 80 people find themselves trapped in a smoke-filled Boeing 727. Join Alice and Zach as they explore the chilling story of a midair bombing that failed only because of a single ingredient mistake—and the 17-year manhunt it set in motion. Discover how one of the most intensive investigation...

On July 19, 1967, Piedmont Airlines Flight 22 collided in midair with a small Cessna over the mountains of North Carolina, killing everyone aboard both aircraft — directly above a children's summer camp at lunchtime. Join Alice and Zach as they trace how a confusing radio clearance, a controller working without radar, and a single misunderstood instruction lined up into catastrophe. Discover the s...

On March 6, 2003, Air Algérie Flight 6289 crashed roughly thirty seconds after takeoff from Tamanrasset Airport in the Sahara Desert, killing 102 people. Discover how an engine failure—the kind of emergency pilots train for repeatedly—turned catastrophic through a series of critical mistakes in cockpit management and missed procedures. This episode explores the tragic consequences when standard sa...

On May 15, 2001, an experienced freight engineer steps down from his locomotive in a rural Ohio rail yard to fix a misaligned switch. He's done this kind of work for thirty-five years, the train is creeping along at walking pace, and he'll be back on board in seconds. Then everything goes wrong. Join Alice and Zach for the story of CSX 8888 — a three-thousand-ton freight train carrying tank cars o...

On December 1, 1993, Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 crashed three miles short of its destination in northern Minnesota, killing all 18 people aboard. The weather wasn't extreme. The aircraft wasn't broken. Both pilots were certified, qualified, and physically capable of flying the approach. But as the turboprop descended through the dark, something else was happening in the cockpit — something that...

What happens when a brand-new Boeing 737 flies into a hailstorm so violent that both engines die in the same instant, 16,500 feet above the Gulf Coast? Join Alice and Zach as they explore the 1988 emergency landing of TACA Flight 110, where a 29-year-old captain with one eye, a first officer he trusted, and a brand new aircraft were tested in a way no flight simulator had ever prepared a crew for....

On the night of July 18, 2018, a Malaysia Airlines Airbus A330 pushed back from Brisbane Airport carrying 215 passengers bound for Kuala Lumpur. Within seconds of takeoff, every airspeed display in the cockpit went red — and the crew had no idea how fast they were flying or why. Join Alice and Zach as they unravel a near-disaster that played out in the dark over the Queensland coast, the chain of...