'WHAT Happened In there?!' The Nightmare of Saudia Flight 163

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Below you will find the links to videos and sources used in this episode.

SOURCES
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Sources:

Final Report:

[Alexandrazmeyka]

Hi, I’m a former cabin attendant who gave 32 years of my life to this profession. I would like to thank you with all my heart for the words of gratitude and admiration towards this amazing people who had been killed in this horrible tragedy. I watch all your videos and I an a subscriber to your channel, and I always admire that you mention the cabin crew and praise them. Thank you on behalf of all cabin attendants. We are not just servers!

[Mostafaa]

The level of incompetence shown by so many people involved in this accident is just

[MeowLesty]

The flight engineer going:
"Just put the fire out :)"

Literally same energy as "Just buy a house"

[sampowellmusic]

Totally insane. The plane lands successfully yet everybody dies.

[justvid]

Honestly, when you said that the cabin crew left a trail of empty fire extinguishers while trying to save all those people.. I just broke down. I can't imagine the horror they had to go through.

[jeremypearson]

I think this is the first time I’ve been left speechless by one of your videos. I mean, what were the crew thinking? Their ineptitude cost over three hundred lives. Totally unbelievable.

[chirandyananayakkara]

the fact that peter tell he rather lose both of his engines than dealing with an uncontained fire tell show bad an inflight fire could be.

[marktuttle]

My mom and dad evacuated from an L-1011nin the 1960s. My dad was part of the development team at Lockheed and one of the things that Lockheed had to do was fill up the plane with people and show it could be evacuated within the time limit. My mom and dad volunteered to be some of the people doing the test.

[yawpitchroll]

This incident always disturbs me so much. My father was Lockheed’s F/E Instructor on the Tristar in early 1980, and he was responsible for the final checks and approval of the L-1011 certification for the F/E on the incident flight. He’d also been offered a job with Saudia after he’d provided training to a number of their employees, and we moved to Jeddah about a year after this tragedy. My father told me that he was really distressed as soon as he heard of this incident because he hadn’t been entirely comfortable passing the F/E, whose performance on the simulator was marginal at best, and that decision haunted him for years. I think I’ve still got his logbook in which he recorded the training sessions. It’s one of the incidents my dad (accidentally, I’m sure) used to drive a deep seated fear of flying into me.

[Taffy]

48:12 the final minute of this video was lovely, acknowledging the unsung, and often overlooked heroes. Thank you for that.

[charlotte-mgwj]

I am an uneducated layperson who knows nothing about aviation, I need things explained to me in simple terms.
When Mentour Pilot says, "I would rather face a double engine failure than face this", then you know it's one of the worst things that can happen.

[walmartdog]

About the inflammability of matches: Decades ago at my parents house, there was a sudden strong smell of burning matches. We immediately began looking for the source, couldn't find it, and over the next few hours the odor dissipated. Several years later we were moving some furniture and we found a large box of wooden kitchen matches that had fallen to the floor behind a piece of furniture, ignited, but failed to burn thru the box, then ran out of oxygen and self extinguished.

[Zzzxcvbnn]

My father was a civil engineer from the US working with many expats in Saudi Arabia with a company called CCC, building their infrastructure. He was there in Riyadh airport and witnessed the fire taking place. They had tractors and other equipment on hand and offered to use them to break through the fuselage of the plane to get the passengers out, but the authorities denied any efforts to do so, so they were forced to watch the plane burn to the ground. My father has told us this story over the years, but this is the first time I’m seeing it documented.

[myczk]

“Captain, the plane is on fire and we are being burned alive. Can we please evacuate?”

Captain: sings in Arabic

[markgredler]

I was an FAA engineer in a Civil Aviation Assistance Group in Spain 10 yrs. I had 2 FAA coworkers there that had worked in Saudi Arabia. One of them told me the most amazing incident while he was in Saudi Arabia was a passenger in the rear who actually built a fire on the floor in the aisle to make tea. I don’t know the date or flight number, but it would have been in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s.

[acars]

I have been to Saudi Arabia many times, doing business and consulting with Saudia Airlines. Absolutely no part of this story surprises me in the least. The old saying "they could screw up a one car funeral procession" springs to mind. That is all I will say on the matter.

I also know the L1011 better than most. I worked on almost 25% of the total L1011's ever produced at Delta Air Lines as a mechanic and did extensive mods to them as an avionics engineer. It was a very complicated aircraft that was absolutely the most sophisticated aircraft when it was produced. Even when it was retired it had the smoothest autoland in the sky. But again, it was super complex and you did not want anything but the best pilots flying it.

[TheTonyMcD]

This is by far the craziest air disaster I've ever heard of. I mean, when you realize that at the moment of touchdown that almost everybody was very likely still alive...

[darcymccabe-pbse]

As a pilot, even though I don't fly anymore, I cant believe the captains behavior during this entire thing. Blows my mind. I never had an in flight emergency but I still can't believe this.

[markleadbeatter]

I worked for Saudia in Riyadh in the mid 80’s and still remember the night that we were asked to go to the old airport to rob a hydraulic line off Hotel Kilo, which was still there on its belly surrounded by an earthwork enclosure. As much as it was a confronting sight for myself, it really unsettled my Filipino colleague who was there the night it actually happened in 1980 and he said he would never be able to forget the smell of all things. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the aircraft, so sat in the truck whilst I took the part off. That had to be one of the most surreal experiences of my aviation career, well that and the time I had to rob a case drain filter housing off a crashed Iraqi Airways B737 to make one of our aircraft serviceable. The Middle East sure was an interesting place to work in back then.

[DeanStephen]

I am in no way surprised that the Philippine cabin crew fought to their dying breath to try to save these passengers. I’ve worked with hundreds of these people over the years and they are among the most committed to service cultures on the planet.