A 737 vanishes from radar
over one of the most remote jungles on earth.
The crash pushes investigators to the limit.
On the first day, we had 8 snake bites,
3 broken legs and one cardiac arrest.
It's the worst accident in the history of Panama.
Commercial aircraft just don't fall out of the sky.
Dark theories emerge.
Drug running airplanes out there.
What about a bomb?
They saw a big ball of fire.
It was highly suspicious.
An entire nation is demanding answers.
We had this massive spread of parts
that made no logical sense.
Copa 201.
Only one stunning conclusion can explain it.
It was a big surprise to everybody.
-Come on! -I'm trying, Captain.
Mayday! Mayday!
Tocumen International Airport in Panama City.
V1.
Copa Airlines flight 201
takes off for a short flight to Cali, Colombia.
Rotate.
Gear up.
Captain Rafael Chial
is Copa's most senior pilot.
Today, he's monitoring the instruments.
Set thrust to climb.
First Officer Cesareo Tejada is flying the plane.
40 passengers are onboard,
mostly business travellers heading home to Colombia.
The flight usually takes about an hour.
But tonight, there's a hitch that could add some time.
We've got some heavy weather moving in from the Gulf.
Flight 201 is heading straight for a storm.
In Panama out over the water,
8 to 10 miles out because the Gulf's there
there's a lot of convective activity and thunderstorms.
The weather was unusually terrible.
It was a storm, big, big storm.
It looks like we're going to have to take the long way around.
If you fly through a powerful thunderstorm,
there's up and down drafts.
It can overcome the airplane
so you don't fly through them.
It looks clear to the east.
The pilots need to find a way to fly around the bad weather.
Agreed. I will let them know what we are doing.
You look at the weather and you decide if you can do it.
If you can't, you ask for a vector around the thunderstorms.
Panama Centre,
Copa 201.
We'd like to get around this weather.
Requesting a new heading for 0-9-0.
Copa 201, copy that.
You're cleared on a heading 0-9-0.
Cleared to heading 0-9-0.
(Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna take a short detour)
(to avoid some bumpy weather.)
(It may delay our arrival in Cali.)
I will keep you posted.
The new flight path will take the 737
east around the storm
before heading south again to Cali.
Panama Centre,
Copa 201.
It's been 12 minutes since take off.
Level at 2-5-0.
The captain tells controllers
he's reached cruising altitude, 25,000 feet.
Minutes later, the plane disappears from radar.
The controller tries the radio
but gets no response.
If you're close to thunderstorms and in a lot of rain,
there'll be static on the radio
and sometimes you may not be able to talk to them
for a few minutes.
Graciela Ocana is one of the controllers on duty.
The flight was leaving Panama airspace,
entering Colombia airspace.
Hopefully it's just interference from the storm.
When the signal disappeared in the radar,
I was warned what happened.
The plane's last known location
was over Panama's remote Darien Gap.
Their last radar return was here,
over Darien jungle.
The plane has vanished over an almost impenetrable jungle.
If Copa 201 crashed here,
just getting to the crash site will be a huge struggle.
Ocana reports the missing flight to aviation authorities.
Hey. Have you had any radio contact
with Copa 201?
Then, comes the news she's been dreading.
Early in the morning,
I received a call from a radio station in Darien.
Any survivors?
Witnesses on the ground have reported a terrifying sight.
During the night, they saw a big ball of fire
falling from the sky.
We had to find out where the aircraft was
and if there was anyone alive they could save.
The next day, searchers make their way to the crash site.
But all 47 people onboard are dead.
Even if it's one person it's a big loss
and it's a plane full of passengers.
It's really terrible.
In Panama City, air crash investigators
set up a command post at a local flight school.
Panama's deputy director of civil aviation,
Jorge Rodriguez,
is under enormous pressure to figure out what happened.
The loss of such a large aircraft
has left his country in shock.
At that time it was the first big accident
of an air carrier of Panama.
We lost 47 people onboard, all dead.
The bad weather leads to immediate speculation
that the Copa pilots may have been overcome
by a deadly storm.
They reported a nasty weather in the Gulf of Panama at that time.
I want any weather data for this entire area.
In the Darien province, Panamanian firemen
say a prayer for the 47 people who died aboard flight 201.
The search to understand why they died
brings NTSB investigator
Tom Haueter to Panama City.
There's a lot of pressure on the NTSB in all investigations
to determine the cause of the accident.
That's what we do.
So certainly we want to know what happened, why
and we want to prevent another accident.
That's our main mission.
Tom Haueter, NTSB.
How are you doing?
But there is added pressure on Haueter
because of the type of plane involved in the tragedy,
a Boeing 737.
I'd really like to get a look at the rudder on this one.
The rudder is a critical control surface in the tail
that helps to turn the plane.
The NTSB suspects a rudder failure
caused the recent crash of another 737,
United Airlines flight 585.
We had previously had an accident with a 737
in Colorado Springs.
It was on approach when it suddenly rolled over
and dove into the ground high speed, killing all aboard.
A possible connection between the 2 crashes
makes it critical to figure out what brought down flight 201.
Because that was an unsolved accident,
we were very anxious to know is there other evidence out there
that would help us solve that case.
If rudder failure brought down both flights,
there could be a fatal flaw in every 737,
the most popular commercial airliner in the sky.
Passengers all over the world could be at risk.
In Panama's Darien province,
investigators begin the painstaking task
of trying to find all the wreckage of Copa flight 201.
The dense vegetation makes it almost impossible
to spot small pieces from the air.
The team must search on foot with the help of local guides.
It wasn't laid out as we normally see in a crash
where the airplane comes in
and you know, here's the nose,
here's the centre section, here's the tail.
It turned out there were like parts all over
and so we were trying to determine where they were
and so it became just a major search.
They need to find as much of the plane as they can,
but they quickly realise it's going to be a daunting task.
The Darien jungle is probably
the remotest section of Latin America you can think of.
The Pan-American Highway does not go through there.
There are no roads. There is just nothing.
It's like one of the worst jungles in the world.
I probably saw insects
that National Geographic hasn't even seen yet.
It was just very tough.
On the first day, we had 8 snake bites,
3 broken legs and one cardiac arrest.
As they work,
they map the location of every fragment of the plane.
Tracking where the pieces landed
could hold clues about why the plane crashed.
Most of the pieces are small,
but a trail of scorched vegetation
leads to the first large piece of the plane.
There was a large cleared out area that actually,
there was a lot of fire that took place from the fuel.
This is the centre section of the wing.
The main landing gear is right there below you.
The other piece is just down the hill.
It's an important find,
but many more parts are still missing,
including the rudder and the cockpit.
The wreckage is spread across more than 100 square miles.
For investigators,
the large area is a critical clue.
Clearly, there had been some type of high speed event
where the airplane had broken up
and basically just rained parts down on the jungle.
The cause of the breakup we didn't know
so we have to take a look at the wreckage
and try to determine how all these pieces of puzzle fit.
The crash site's proximity to the Colombian border
suggests an obvious theory.
It's an air corridor for drugs.
It's a busy one.
The Darien jungle is right on the border
between Panama and Colombia
and there was a fair amount of drug activity
coming back and forth across the jungle.
The remote jungle of the Darien Gap
is a haven for drug cartels
flying illicit merchandise north from secret airstrips.
At that time we don't got no radar
that is gonna patrol the route of the drug smuggler.
Drug runners usually fly at night
when they're less likely to be spotted.
(Panama Centre,)
(Copa 201.)
(We'd like to get around this weather.)
Requesting a new heading for 0-9-0.
Unlike commercial crews,
smugglers avoid radar detection
by switching off their plane's radar transponder.
And they never check in with air traffic control.
If he does not report,
who will know that they are there?
It's really dangerous,
especially if there is not good visibility.
Cleared to heading 0-9-0.
We'll let you know when we get clear of this weather.
Perhaps the unsuspecting pilots
suddenly crossed paths with drug runners.
Plane!
It would have been the last thing they ever saw.
We thought of, you know, drug running airplanes out there,
something else going on out there.
Everything was open for consideration.
If flight 201 did hit another aircraft,
investigators should be able to find some trace of the second plane
among the wreckage they're pulling from the jungle.
If a red airplane hits a blue airplane,
the paint's gonna transfer
and you're gonna get a little bit of one on the other.
They scrutinise each piece carefully,
hunting for any speck of paint
that could have come from a covert drug plane.
But they come up empty.
Even more telling, there's no wreckage
that could have come from a second plane.
We didn't find any other wreckages, old or new,
and looking at the wreckage we found from the Copa airplane,
we didn't find any evidence of a mid-air collision.
There's another possibility.
What about a bomb?
Flight 201 was bound for Cali, Colombia,
home of a violent drug cartel.
Investigators know that a bomb onboard
could explain the eyewitness reports of fire in the sky.
Certainly we were interested in the possibility of an explosion.
We brought an FAA explosive expert with us.
Is it possible a bomb went off
and caused the breakup of the airplane?
Is it possible for something else?
We needed to take a look at everything.
Commercial aircraft just don't fall out of the sky
so those individuals putting the team together
felt that it was highly suspicious
and might be something in my area of expertise.
Explosives expert Calvin Walbert
begins his search for evidence of an onboard bomb.
There's a tremendous amount of pressure
because everybody wants that answer yesterday.
He's looking for signature blast marks
caused by the superheated gasses from an explosion.
There's indicators that you look for
that will tell you that this is caused from an explosive event.
It's not caused from just, you know,
a fire or fuel erupting or something like that.
If there were a bomb,
the tell-tale marks will most likely be found on metal debris.
On something like aircraft aluminium,
you would be looking for pitting and cratering,
kind of like the surface of the moon.
He carefully examines each piece.
He finds burn marks, evidence of a fire,
but there's no sign of an explosive detonation.
The bomb theory is looking less likely,
but it can't be ruled out completely
until they carry out one final test.
The dead are airlifted to Panama City
where the bodies will be x-rayed to check for imbedded shrapnel.
I'm looking for something that would be foreign
to that human remains
that is not part of the aircraft,
that is not part of their personal effects,
that it is something that would indicate that it was a bomb.
(Base camp, come in.)
A call from the jungle search team
brings some much-needed good news.
(We've got the black boxes.)
The exhausting effort has paid off.
They've found flight 201's black boxes.
This could be the breakthrough investigators need.
At least we got something to analyse what was the cause of the accident.
Without those boxes you're blind.
You don't got nothing.
There's no lab in Panama
equipped to analyse the recorders.
They need to go to
the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington.
We were anxious to look at the flight data recorder.
The flight data recorder was the only data we had
from the flight itself up to the time of the breakup.
NTSB technicians work quickly
to download the information stored on the 2 recorders.
The flight data recorder tracks information
like air speed and heading.
The voice recorder
captures the sound of the pilots' conversation in the cockpit.
We were hoping with the cockpit voice recorder,
we'd get more information in terms of what the crew is saying,
what was happening right at the time of impact.
The flight data recorder is in good condition,
but the same can't be said for the voice recorder.
It was a big surprise to everybody.
Somehow, the tape has snapped and come unspooled.
My God. What a mess.
The surprise was the tape was broken completely
like black spaghetti.
You just had a ball of Mylar tape.
Investigators won't know what answers the tape holds
unless they can somehow repair it.
If the people from the NTSB
cannot put that tape to work,
there was no way.
Battling 120 degree heat in the Panamanian jungle,
investigators struggle to learn what they can
from the wreckage of Copa flight 201.
Another big find
could be a crucial lead in 2 investigations.
They've recovered a key part from the plane's rudder,
the power control unit.
The power control unit is a hydraulic ram, if you will,
that moves the rudder back and forth.
It's the same part investigators suspect may have failed
during the recent crash of a United Airlines 737.
If there's a failure mode out there
that's affecting thousands of airplanes,
we want to document what happened,
work with the FAA, the manufacturers
to correct the problem so the accident can't happen again.
If they find evidence that the critical component malfunctioned,
it will send shockwaves through the entire industry.
Boeing company will stop all those airplanes.
They will not be flying if that was the issue.
Investigators test the mechanism.
They need to know if it jammed in flight,
a failure that could easily put a 737 into a sudden dive.
But it's another dead end.
There was no evidence of pre-existing damage.
It appeared to be working normally up to the time of impact.
The team hopes the plane's engines
will provide a better lead.
In rare cases,
turbine engines have been known to overheat and catch fire.
If you got a fire in the engine,
there's a lot of things that you can look at.
If there was an engine fire on flight 201,
investigators should be able to find black scorch marks
on fan blades and other internal parts.
But, again, their inspection turns up nothing.
The engines, there wasn't a problem at all in that flight.
The engines were working normally when the plane broke apart.
Investigators are still no closer
to understanding what happened in the skies over Panama.
Medical x-rays eliminate yet another theory.
All of the victims' remains were x-rayed
to see if there's any evidence of an explosion.
The images show no sign of any foreign debris
that could have come from an explosion onboard.
There was nothing that I saw or that I observed
that would indicate to me that there was a device
onboard Copa flight 201.
Altitude.
Pull up! Pull up!
Investigators now believe the flames witnesses saw
ignited after the plane broke apart.
It wasn't a bomb.
There's enormous pressure on the investigation.
Panamanians want to know
what caused their nation's deadliest air disaster.
How, how could that happen?
We could not imagine.
We needed the answer.
In Washington, there's renewed hope
of finding answers in the cockpit voice recorder.
Technicians have managed to repair the broken tape.
Well, it took a lot of effort
but they slowly, you know, found an end
and straightened it out, rolled it back up, got it on a reel.
Rodriguez can finally listen to the sounds
captured in the cockpit.
(Copa 4129,)
(you are cleared for take off.)
But what he hears reveals a stunning new problem.
(Cleared for take off, 4129.)
(Okay. Here we go.)
The recording is not from flight 201.
It's from a flight days earlier.
It seems that the tape was already broken
when flight 201 took off.
That tape was broke about 7 days before that accident
and that was the reason that the recorder wasn't working at all.
It's very unusual that it does not operate.
I flew the airplane for many years.
I don't recall ever
having the cockpit voice recorder not work.
The first funeral
is for one of the 5 flight attendants.
Many mourners are asking the same question as investigators.
Why did this tragedy happen?
It was like a nightmare that you wish you could wake up.
You do not expect that to happen,
even less in your country.
The flight data is finally in the hands of investigators.
It paints a terrifying picture.
Flight 201 suddenly went into a catastrophic dive.
Pull up!
The airplane started coming down from 25,000 feet.
Until it disintegrated at 9195.
10,000 feet a minute.
The extreme speed of the dive
solves the mystery of the mid-air breakup.
It's not designed
for flying inverted at speeds approaching the speed of sound
and so we're trying to understand
how it got from a level flight
to be inverted coming down at high speed.
That few seconds is really the focus of the investigation.
The fierce weather over the Gulf of Panama
may have been a factor.
We had reports that the storm extended
more than 100 miles from east to west.
If the Copa crew flew into a severe storm,
there's a chance the pilots were confused
by what experts call spatial disorientation.
This is something else.
Do you have visual reference on your side?
No.
Flying in weather at night in thunderstorms
can be totally disorienting.
You can't really trust your own senses.
The inner ear will not lead you to the right conclusion necessarily.
The G-forces you're feeling may lead you to think
you're turning left when you're turning right.
Altitude.
What in God's name?
Pull up! Pull up!
Investigators use radar information captured in the tower
to plot flight 201's path.
They want to compare it to the path of the storm.
We could go back and look at the weather data
and the long-range radar data.
We knew where the storm was.
We knew where the airplane was by the impact
and so we could piece together their flight path
and where they're going.
The results are conclusive.
Flight 201 wasn't anywhere near the storm.
I say that the weather wasn't an issue in that accident.
Investigators still can't explain
what happened to Copa flight 201.
They need a better approach.
The data we had, the take off, the climb out,
you know, the cruise,
everything just looked like a normal flight.
They delve deeper
into the last 2 minutes of flight data
and discover some very unusual flight manoeuvres.
Okay. Looks like they turned right and then left
and then right again until they spiralled into a dive.
It doesn't make any sense.
The flight data seems completely baffling.
Could it hold the key
to explaining why 47 people died on Copa 201?
Investigators zero in
on the final 2 minutes of flight 201.
Let's have a look at this thing.
They create an animation of the flight data...
Everything was normal. That was abrupt.
hoping it will shed some light on how the 737
could have made such strange manoeuvres.
Should be correcting. It's not correcting.
What the heck's going on?
But it only adds to the mystery.
We would start seeing the aircraft, you know,
roll over into a bank angle,
then suddenly snap back to level or vice versa.
The strange motion
is unlike anything an airliner usually does during flight.
It was trying to understand
how can the airplane manoeuvre the way it's doing
and that was causing quite a bit of problems
'cause we couldn't make it fit.
The aircraft is normally flown very gentle
as if your grandmother's in the back and she does not like to fly
because you're trying to make a happy customer
and make them come back and fly with you again.
Could the pilots have been incapacitated by drugs
or a medical emergency?
We've gotta find that cockpit.
There's no way to answer that question
unless they can find the pilots' bodies
and carry out forensic tests.
So that was one of the main part of the investigation
was we have to get the cockpit.
Investigators are prepared for the hunt.
Before going into the jungle,
they examined a 737 just like the one that crashed.
I thought, if we're hunting around the jungle
looking for parts and pieces,
it might be nice to see what they look like intact
so if we came across them in the jungle,
we'd have an idea what we were really seeing.
The meticulous search finally pays off.
We found the cockpit in the base of a big tree,
like it hit the tree and stopped there.
In Panama City, pathologists examine the bodies.
Doing the autopsies, we found no evidence
of a heart seizure at that time
or any medical event with either of the pilots
at the time of the impact.
Toxicology tests also confirm
that neither pilot was impaired by drugs.
There must be another explanation for the bizarre manoeuvres.
We're trying to understand
what happened here to cause the upset.
It was quite a mystery for a long time.
With little else to go on,
investigators focus on the cockpit debris.
It provides some intriguing details
about the last moments of the flight.
We started being able to piece together
what may have been going on
in the cockpit at the time this happened.
The delicious food makes up for the long hours.
The first officer is flying the airplane.
The captain is back from the controls.
He's having his meal.
Everything seems like very normal flight
when things started going wrong.
Investigators study the flight instruments
and cockpit controls
that pilots rely on to fly the plane.
The position of a switch raises an immediate red flag.
The vertical gyro switch
affects the most important flight instrument in the cockpit,
the attitude indicator.
V1.
Rotate.
Each pilot has his own attitude indicator.
It shows him how the plane is positioned
with respect to the horizon.
The pilot's attitude indicator is like a ball.
It shows bank angle, it shows pitch.
It's the sole control of the aircraft
and without it,
it would be very, very difficult to fly the airplane.
Each attitude indicator is connected to its own sensor,
called a vertical gyro or VG.
The gyros constantly measure the plane's attitude.
If the gyros don't match,
the pilots get a warning.
Normally, you'll have the captain's attitude indicator
powered by one gyro
and the first officer's attitude indicator
powered by another gyro.
If there's a problem with one gyro,
the pilots can switch both indicators
onto the other one.
If one gyro goes bad,
you don't want to have the pilot looking at bad data
so you switch them both
over to the good data.
It appears that's what happened.
The gyro control switch
has been positioned to feed both indicators from VG1,
the captain's gyro.
Looks like they were having trouble with the first officer's gyro.
Both of them were reading data
from the same gyro source,
which makes you think that at some point
either it was selected that way
or they didn't realise it had been selected that way
but they're both feeding data from the same source,
which is unusual.
Investigators could be on the verge of an important breakthrough,
but they won't know for sure
until they can test the flight instruments
for any kind of malfunction.
We basically removed all the components from the cockpit
and shipped those back to the US for examination.
This could be their last chance to understand
what happened to flight 201.
Investigators need to know if a faulty cockpit instrument
was giving the crew of flight 201 misleading data
about the position of their plane.
Okay. Fire it up.
What we wanted to look at was
is there anything here that would show us what happened?
Is there a failure of the gyros?
Or maybe the failure is actually attitude indicator.
They test the displays
and the gyros that feed them.
Well, this one seems to work fine.
There's nothing wrong with the first officer's instrument.
Let me see the other one.
They run the same test
on the captain's attitude indicator.
At first, the captain's instrument seems fine too.
We put them on a bench. We could power them up.
They actually worked quite well.
Then, they notice something odd.
Hang on. It seems to be stuck.
Occasionally, the display momentarily freezes in place.
The attitude indicator stops moving,
even though the gyro feeding it is still in motion.
Yeah. There it goes. Now, it's working.
Investigators need to know what's causing the failure.
They test every wire connecting the display to the gyro.
No wonder.
Finally, they find the culprit.
This wire is hanging by a thread.
We found basically a break in the wire, intermittent.
It was close enough
that sometimes it would touch and sometimes it wouldn't.
The discovery gives new meaning
to the bizarre rolling motion captured by the flight data recorder.
The captain's instrument and the flight recorder
are both fed by the same gyro.
The way the airplane is wired
is what the captain is seeing on his attitude indicator
is what's being recorded on the flight data recorder.
Since the captain's gyro was broken,
it was sending faulty roll data to the recorder.
Copa 201
didn't really make any quick rolling manoeuvres at all.
Okay. Let's see what the plane was really doing.
By carefully analysing
other parameters on the flight data recorder,
they manage to calculate its actual movements
and reveal the plane's true motion.
Making a visual of it where you could see
what the data's showing and what the airplane's doing,
that visual is extraordinarily helpful.
The red image shows the bad data the pilots were seeing,
while the solid image
shows how Copa 201 was actually flying.
They're trying to level the plane
but they're making it worse.
You have the attitude indicator here stuck.
Now but the airplane's going the other direction
and suddenly the attitude indicator gets power to it,
unsticks, it goes back and mimics the airplane again.
The pilots' ability to troubleshoot the problem
was likely complicated by the intermittent nature of the failure.
Go right. You need to go right.
I am! What's it doing?
If they're totally confused by their attitude indicator,
they are making improper control inputs.
When it sticks, the pilot's trying to correct that problem
and so he's trying to get the airplane level again
and what he doesn't realise is that all he's doing
is making the problem worse in the wrong direction.
He's looking at an instrument providing bad data
and unfortunately in the period of time
he lost control of the aircraft.
The plane rolls so far to the right it becomes unrecoverable.
Though the pilots don't know it,
they're now falling from the sky.
Once it got to this point, they didn't have a chance.
But a puzzling question remains.
It was the captain's gyro that failed in flight
and started sending bad data.
So why did the pilots select it?
So the question is why they believed
the captain's gyro was the good one.
Why was it switched to that position?
Because of that mistake,
both pilots were seeing the wrong information.
The accident wouldn't have happened
had they been on VG2.
What could have led the pilots to make such a lethal error?
You want to know:
how are they trained for unusual events?
What's their level of skill?
How would they handle unusual situations?
Are they trained for gyro failures?
Okay. Let's start.
Investigators go into the type of flight simulator
the Copa crew used for their 737 training.
Climb to 25,000 and turn right.
They recreate the flight of Copa 201.
Now trigger the failure.
Including the malfunction of the captain's attitude indicator.
Now how'd you make the switch?
Wait a minute. Let me see that.
That is not the same switch that was on Copa 201.
2 different configurations for one small control switch
has overwhelming implications for the investigation.
This is the gyro switch from the simulator
where the captain was trained.
Next slide please.
And this is the gyro switch from Copa 201.
Now can we get a close-up please?
All right. Now let's see both.
Wow. That's completely different.
The cockpits in the simulator were dissimilar
and so it was possible to get confused,
thinking you were going to independent gyro source
when you weren't.
In the simulator, flipping the toggle to the left
switches the captain's instrument to an auxiliary gyro,
independent of the other 2.
On flight 201, flipping the switch to the left
puts both instruments on the captain's malfunctioning gyro.
Panama Centre,
Copa 201.
Level at 2-5-0.
(Roger that, 201.)
With no voice recording from the cockpit of Copa 201,
investigators will never know for certain
who flipped the switch the wrong way.
But they've finally collected enough evidence
to build a compelling theory
of how the flight went so horribly wrong.
Turning right, heading 1-6-0.
After diverting around the storm,
the crew of Copa flight 201
needs to turn right to get back on course.
The delicious food makes up for the long hours.
We're well clear of the storm now.
As the plane levels out,
an error flag warns there's a problem
with the captain's attitude indicator.
They fall back on their training
and flip the gyro switch to the left,
thinking they're switching to the auxiliary gyro.
You may revert to your training
and do something inappropriate
because that's what you're trained to do.
Now they're both on the bad gyro
and neither of them knows about it.
That's weird. Why won't it level?
The gyro malfunction causes the autopilot to switch off.
First officer Tejada must now fly by hand.
He turns his wheel to level the wings.
His frozen instrument
makes it look like the plane isn't responding
so he continues to turn the controls,
sending the plane further and further to the left.
He's trying to correct a problem he's seeing on his instrument.
He's taught, you know, follow your instruments
and believe in the instruments.
He's actually making the problem a lot worse.
The pilots have no way of sensing their error.
It's too dark to see anything outside that could help orient them.
In the middle of the night, you don't have the horizon.
You lose the horizon, you don't know where you are.
As the short circuit cuts in and out,
the instrument starts working, then suddenly stops again.
Go right. You need to go right.
I am. What's it doing?
Now he sees a left bank
so he's trying to correct it by banking right.
In the cabin, there's little sign of trouble.
The barrel roll move manoeuvre was fairly smooth.
There was one G so it's,
I doubt the passengers really realised the impending danger
until the airplane was essentially inverted
and starting to come through
and then it would have happened very quickly.
Altitude!
What in God's name?
Pull up! Pull up!
In between the 2 pilots,
there's a third standby attitude indicator
fed by its own independent gyro.
By comparing the 2 main indicators to the standby,
pilots can quickly determine
which one of the main indicators is faulty.
The standby attitude indicator
should have given them the correct indication.
Why the pilots didn't use the standby
remains a mystery.
Had they looked at the standby,
it would have said there's something really wrong here.
That just didn't happen.
By the time the pilots realise they're in a dive...
Left! Left! Left!
I'm trying, Captain.
it's too late.
It'd be extraordinarily disconcerting.
You've gone from a few degrees to the left
to multiple degrees to the right.
It's like, what's happening here?
Once unusual attitudes get out of hand,
they're much more difficult to recover from.
This airplane got so nose low
and at such a high speed,
I can't imagine in the cockpit what was going on.
In seconds, massive G-forces
incapacitate passengers and crew.
I think I have it, Captain.
Oh, God!
As the airplane gets faster,
now components are being overstressed
and you'll start breaking off parts of the aircraft.
In the dive, the airplane caught fire because of rupture of the tank
and explodes.
We're so sorry that,
that the end was the worst.
It's the worst accident in the history of Panama
and I hope we never go through one again.
Jorge Rodriguez spends months
helping prepare the final report on Copa 201
for Panama's Civil Aviation Authority.
It's very important that you analyse
and find out what was the cause of the accident.
Copa Airlines responds with a major overhaul of its fleet,
standardising the layout of cockpit controls.
Their fleet is fully harmonised.
It's a completely different airline than it was at that time.
Copa also revamps pilot training
to make sure its crews are prepared
for any instrument malfunction.
I flew 4 and a half years with them
and their training is the best I've seen.
I really respect them for that.
For the airline industry, Copa 201 is a reminder
of how even small problems can result in catastrophe.
A minor flaw can result in a tragedy
and so we have to always look for these flaws.
We have to train for them.
We have to every day challenge ourselves to be the best,
whether it's the guy who makes the component on the bench,
to the people who maintain the aircraft, to the pilots.
It takes everybody working together.