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Faced with the extreme conditions of the far North, three flights fall out of the sky leaving investigators to uncover the cause.

Air Disasters

Northern Extremes

America's stories told by the Smithsonian

SMITHSONIAN CHANNEL HD

Three flights end in tragedy after miscommunication mix-ups and personality clases; Investigators try to unravel what went wrong.

Cockpit Breakdown

Three catastrophic runway collisions raise the same pressing question; a look at how two planes end up on the same runway at the same time.

Runway Collisions

Three planes are brought down by ice and it's up to investigators to determine how modern aircraft could possibly end up with frozen wings.

Frozen Wings

Relying on instinct rather than the rule book, three flights end in tragedy when crews improvise on their final approach.

Landings Gone Wrong

In Sao Paolo, the Himalayas, and on the Norwegian coast, the toughest landings on earth pushed three flight crews.

Risky Runways

Faced with a midair crisis, pilots must make a life or death decision, but the wrong approach can trigger a far more serious problem.

Lethal Choices

Three crews experience the same devastating event; but with radically different outcomes when an engine falls off their commercial airplane.

Engine Gone

Confused, flying blind, and lost in the dark, three crews lose site of the horizon and fall into the same deadly trap.

Dead of Night

Three flights ending in tragedy, prove that minor missteps during takeoff can have disastrous consequences.

Take Off Tragedies

Mid-air tragedies are particularly horrifying when they occur over a community, and rain terror on the people below.

Death from Above

From the wreckage of three airplane crashes, survivors emerge to tell harrowing tales and provide critical data about what to do in an emergency.

Survivors

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Statistically, traveling by airplane is safer than driving and other forms of transportation, but when something goes wrong during a flight, it can be catastrophic with potentially hundreds of lives at stake. This series examines some of the world's worst air disasters, using official reports, transcripts and interviews with people involved to tell the stories of midair mishaps and discover what went wrong in each case. Episodes include a discussion of how the weather affects flights -- including stories of aviation disasters and near-misses -- and a New Year's Eve flight that fell from the sky into the Florida Everglades.

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History's most terrifying air disasters, and the investigations that followed, are revisited and reexamined.

S20 E2 | Rookie Errors