How Pan Am's Criminal Negligence Crashed A Jet | Pan Am Flight 160

707 Image: Rob Hodgkins
This is the story of Pan Am flight 160. On the 3rd of november 1973 a pan am cargo 707 was on the ground at JFK on its way to frankfurt with a stopover in prestwick scotland . The cargo on the flight was mostly innocuous but it held in its cargo holds 15000 pounds or 6800 kilos of chemicals. The plane took off with no issues whatsoever and once in the air the controllers asked flight 160 to climb and maintain 31000 feet.
As flight 160 continued its climb at 9:04 am the pilots noticed something strange. Smoke was starting to accumulate near the electrical compartment. The plane at this point was 100 miles east of montreal and the pilots thought that the best course of action would be to divert to boston. Immediately they let pan am operations or panop know about the smoke in the cockpit. Montreal center immediately cleared the plane to make a 180 degree turn. But as the plane made a bee line for boston the smoke in the cockpit was growing thicker and thicker. Within minutes the smoke was so thick that the pilots made another radio call to the operations center they said “the smoke is getting too thick”. The back of the cockpit was full of smoke at this time, no one knew how much time they had in the air before the fire would consume everything onboard. The controllers at boston knew that flight 160 was in some serious trouble so much so that they gave flight 160 preferential treatment even though they had not declared a formal emergency. Onboard the 707 things were going from bad to worse, the DME or the distance measuring equipment no longer worked and so the pilots asked the controllers for the distance boston. The 707 was starting to fail. The controller replied with "You're passing abeam, Pease Air Force Base, right now, s i r , and you're about 40 to 45 miles to the northwest of
Boston”. The controller asked the pilots if they wanted to declare an emergency but the pilots said “ Negative on the emergency, and may we have runway 33L”. The controllers were more than willing to give this crew anything they needed to get the burning plane on the ground, the pilots were now shutting down all non essential systems.
The crew and the controllers were coordinating on the best and fastest way to get the plane on the ground. Soon the plane was nearing Boston, they were almost down. The controller said “"Clipper 160, advise anytime you have the airport in sight. " But the crew didnt reply. The controller transmissitted again “"Clipper 160, this is Boston approach control. If you read, squawk ident on any transponder. I see your transponder just became inoperative. Continue
inbound now for runway 33 left, you're No. 1”. Still no reply. From the tower other controllers got a glimpse of flight 160, the left hand cockpit window was open and smoke was billowing out from it. The plane looked like it was barely under control. Yawing and rolling from side to side. Then it crashed short of the runway. The controller who had been talking to flight 160 transmitted “' A l l aircraft on the frequency, the airport is closed at Boston”. None of the 3 crew members on flight 160 survived.

The wreck of the plane showed tell tale signs of a fire onboard. Parts of the plane were caked with soot. The CVR showed that the pilots had donned the oxygen masks but the smoke still overcame them over the course of the flight. Just to put into context how hard it was for the crew, the crew asked if they could stay on the current radio frequency because it was too hard for them to see the radio stack through the smoke. But despite this they all remained calm and professional and kept working the problem at hand.

[warrenclement]

I was a witness to the approach to Bos and at the same time heard all the radio transmissions between the tower and the 707. I was about to taxi a Convair 580 from a gate for maintenance purposes when I heard the tower offering landing clearance to the Clipper starting with 22R, 22L then 33, the airplane was not responding on the radio and finally was given the clear to land any runway. The airplane turned final to Rwy. 33. and it began a number of Dutch Rolls, alternating from left to the right wing. The intensity of the rolls was increasing as it continued to get closer to the runway. The final roll was a complete one and the airplane crashed inverted into the ground at an almost vertical attitude. Later while reliving the event, I couldn’t remember if the landing gear was up or down.

[TheRockprincess]

My Chemical Engineer heart just sank hearing about the way the nitric acid was transported. Even if the laws are not good, the logistics company should at least be aware of the hazards of transporting chemicals.

[MrSuzuki]

Professional pilots DECLARE AN EMERGENCY when they are experiencing an emergency! I am a retire airline pilot and at my airline, we would declare an emergency even if the situation was not dire, just in case things got worse. Also, why would the flight engineer switch essential power to the ground mode when they were still in flight? I was a B-727 flight engineer instructor and we would never have switched to the ground mode, because the checklist said GROUND. Man... A very well done presentation and I commend you for making things clear even to the non-pilot.

[savroi]

Yes, criminally negligent, no doubt. The transportation of hazardous chemicals are on the same level as bombs. They can't be treated as ordinary cargo and must be handled with extreme precaution. I am amazed nothing happened whilst they were set inside the cargo bay.

[steinarjonsson_]

There is no such thing as a non-serious fire on board a plane. There is only one type of fire and it is ALWAYS dead serious!

[fleetwin]

My uncle flew for Pan Am back then and told me about this accident, he had just flown with this poor captain a few weeks earlier.

[questionablebackyardmeows]

Very similar to the Valujet crash (except then it was oxygen generators in a closed hold that caused/fueled the fire). Amazing no one had learned the "always check cargo" lesson from this

[bruceabrahamsen]

I had smoke a few times in my flying career. Diverted to the nearest airport! You can't mess around as you can see with this crash.

[russellholm]

As someone who worked for an airline for 28 years loading aircraft, YES THEY WERE NEGLIGENT !

[Monothefox]

The goggles, they do nothing!

Yes, PanAm were grossly negligent.

[PDX]

You may be interested in United Flight 173 that occurred on Dec. 28. 1978. Flight crashed into a Portland, OR neighbothood b/c they ran out of fuel. A guy had been living in a house he was remodeling & decided to get a burger and when he got back his home was in small slivers.

[hostrauer]

Unfortunately, the Boeing 707's design made it especially vulnerable to a well known yaw-roll problem called a "Dutch roll, " making the yaw damper on the 707 extra vital.

[vicstick]

If a cockpit full of smoke is not an emergency, I don't know what is.

[AlchemistCH]

Whoever had the idiocy to pack the nitric acid like that was the definition of criminal negligence. Laws or no laws - if you are selling such materials, you have to ensure they wouldn't cause an incident.
As for the aircraft operator - depends on how much information they were given. There's a huge difference between mishandling something covered in hazard labels and not triple-checking every item on the cargo manifest for lack of those labels (or other things the sender is supposed to be aware of).

[Ananth]

Awesome video man as always.. It's always a nightmare for pilots if there is a smoke in the cockpit... Oh boy as you said if they had identified the source of fire they would have survived the crash

[lukjad]

Reminds me of how that company who made one wheel told their customers to black out the part on the shipping waybill that said it was hazardous material. FedEx banned them.

[exrobowidow]

Years after this accident, I was in line to check my baggage at the ticketing counter. Another family had a small RC car they were trying to check, as they were traveling to some type of event for their hobby. Unfortunately for them, it was gas powered. They weren't allowed to transport the fuel, of course. But they also were not allowed to transport the car, because it had gas in the tank. "But we emptied the gas tank completely!" they said. The airline agent explained that there is always residual fuel, which causes fumes, so they could not take the car on the airline. PERIOD. I felt sorry for the family, as they probably did not have time to arrange ground transportation for their little car. I was also a little, tiny bit surprised that an empty gas tank could be such a huge problem, and couldn't be resolved somehow, but obviously it's good that the airline was putting safety first. You don't want even "a little bit" of unsafe, when you're in the air.

I guess the moral of the story is: Do your homework before attempting to transport questionable items by air.

[Relkond]

How they stored the cargo reminds me of that time a chemical plant stored one component of a binary rocket fuel in drums made from the other component.
That had worked well* until the plant blew up.

*that factory had small, easily extinguished fires all the time. Until they weren’t easily extinguished.

[mrkiplingreallywasanexceed]

Incredible that the pilots didnt know they had ruddy nitric acid on board. Incredible how FAA didnt have the teeth to deal with their own transport of hazardous materials regs.
Yes, surely the airline ultimately responsible for compliance and safety?

[John-ijvi]

Thank you for doing what you do. As always a really great and informative video.