The Man Who Slammed His Passenger Jet Into New York | Alitalia Flight 618

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The pilot who slammed his passenger plane into new york / when impatience rips a passenger jet apart / How Breaking The rules Tore this passenger Jet apart
This is the story of alitalia flight 618. The year is 1970 and its the 15th of september. A DC-8 was operating a flight from rome to italy. The dc 8 had 146 passengers and 10 crew members on board. Hold on a second, they put a quad jet all the way from Rome to New york to carry just 146 passengers? To put that into context a 737 can carry more people. How did they make the economics work for this flight? For context today you do have non stop flights between rome and new york but theyre always served by larger twin engined jets like the 777 or the a350 or the 767 or the a330. Looking back with todays mindset it seems almost comical to put a quad engined dc 8 with just 146 people across the atlantic. Unsurprisingly alitalia has only recorded one year of profit, in its entire history from 1946. Leave your guess as to which year in the comments ill reveal the answer at the end of the video. Questionable route planning decisions aside, the plane left rome at 4;22 am EST or 10 am local time bound for new york. The atlantic crossing was uneventful. As the DC8 was approaching a navigational point about 120 nautical mines northeast of JFK international the controllers cleared the plane to descend from 31000 feet to 20000 feet. By the time the plane was 32 nautical miles from the airport they had gotten all the way down to 6000 feet. JFK radar approach control now had the plane on radar and they gave the pilots the information that theyd need to land at an airport, like altimeter settings winds fog that sort of stuff. Today though pilots got a bit of news that they weren't expecting. The ILS to runway 4R was out of commission. The ILS is this radio beacon that can guide planes right to the foot of a runway. Its not essential but having it is nice you know, like a warm cup of tea in the morning. So the first officer took control of the plane and started following the vectors that air traffic control was giving him to line up with the runway. The controller was giving them all sorts of vectors he asked them to speed up and slow down. By 1:18 pm the controller was almost done setting the plane up for the approach to runway 4R, he said “Alitalia six eighteen you’re three and a half from the marker, turn right zero two zero, cleared ILS four right approach.” But the crew had a problem, they still had a lot of stuff to do and not enough time, so they prepared the aircraft as fast as they could and put the plane into a 1000 foot per minute descent in an attempt to get onto the right glideslope. As the jet came out of the clouds the captain noticed that the plane was way too high and a bit to the right of the runway. He now had a decision to make: he could either go around and try again or he could try and salvage this approach. He chose the latter option. The DC8 started to drop like a stone, it was expected that the plane would ease up sooner or later but it just kept falling and falling. The plane touched down hard and immediately the pilots knew that they were no longer in control of the plane the plane yawed from the left to the right and back again. From the controllers point of view they knew that something was wrong, the landing was so hard that they watched the fuselage of the plane buckle, They saw smoke and flames from a point on the wing roots. Engines three and four were ripped off the right wing as the plane went down the runway. This landing had not gine well the pilots were trying their best to keep this plane on the runway. But it was of no use the plane went off to the left and into the soft mud, the landing gear which were already damaged from the hard landing could take no more and they were ripped off the plane. Not being able to take anymore the fuselage was ripped open as it came to a stop. Seeing all of this unfold the controllers immediately sounded the crash alarm. Incredibly all 157 people survived, 64 people