Aftermath of the 1986 Cerritos mid-air collision—this is not going to end well…..
A young man in the Philippines named Allec Joshua Ibay has developed an interesting—and morbid—hobby. Using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Ibay likes to recreate noteworthy airline crashes from the past.
Ibay’s dedication to this hobby is impressive, with upwards of 30 such crashes now documented on YouTube. The tone is uniformly elegiac, with lachrymose music cues, but the videos also attempt to foreground useful information such as the actual dialogue between the doomed pilots and the control tower.
On some level Ibay knows that what he’s doing is creepy. The default video on his YouTube user page is a 9/11 tribute—not to worry, Ibay has done simulations of both UA Flight 175 and AA Flight 11. He seems to have gone out of his way to find FS2004 topics that are a bit less unsettling, as for instance this tribute to Heathrow or this compilation of safe landings on the island of Sint Maarten, where the airport is notoriously much too close to the beach, which has led to some fairly hilarious pictures of volleyball players confronted with a 747 jet landing almost right on top of them. (Last year we took a look at Jet Airliner: The Complete Works, a memorable book of such photos.) Ibay is currently 18, and some of these videos are more than a year old—I’d feel a little more squicked out if Ibay were in his thirties.
Anyway, Here are a few of Ibay’s greatest, er, hits, but you can see the whole array at his YouTube presence.
August 14, 2005: Helios Airways Flight 522 crashes near Kalamos, Greece, with 115 passengers and 6 crew members on board; no survivors:
August 31, 1986: Aeroméxico Flight 498 collides with a Piper Cherokee over Cerritos, California, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft and 15 people on the ground:
July 19, 1989: A McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffers a complete hydraulic system failure over Iowa after the tail-mounted engine disintegrates. The crew manages a crash landing on the runway of the Sioux City, Iowa, airport. Of the 296 people on board, 111 die:
May 25, 1979: American Airlines Flight 191 crashes upon takeoff from O’Hare International Airport after its left engine becomes detached from the wing, killing all 271 on board and 2 on the ground. It is the worst single-aircraft accident on U.S. soil:
March 27, 1977: KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736 collide on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport in Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, Spain; in what is considered the worst accident in the history of commercial aviation, 583 of 644 people on board both aircraft are killed:
July 25, 2000: Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde, crashes during takeoff from Paris, France, after striking debris on the runway, killing all 100 passengers and 9 crew aboard as well as four on the ground:
via The Daily Dot
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Somebody put this airport waaaay too close to the beach