How One Phrase Crashed A Passenger Jet | TWA 514

Get 25% off Blinkist premium and enjoy 2 memberships for the price of 1! Start your 7-day free trial by clicking here: https://www.blinkist.com/miniaircrash on the first of december 1974, a TWA 727 was on the way from indianapolis international airport to washington national airport with a stopover in port columbus international airport in ohio. The flight to columbus went off without a hitch and when the plane took off from columbus they had 85 people onboard and 7 crew members, although the flight departed columbus a bit late it was nothing that the pilots couldnt make up enroute. But at 10:36 am the pilots got some bad news from the controllers on the ground at cleveland,they said that No planes were landing at washington national airport due to high crosswinds. Due to the cross winds everyone was diverting or being put into a hold the captain of flight 514 got on the phone with the dispatcher, he needed more information to decide what to do. After talking to the dispatcher they decided to divert to washingtons dulles airport as the winds were more favorable there. Cleveland atc then asked flight 514 to descend down to 23000 feet and after a while control was handed over to washington ARTCC. As the plane was being handed off from one ATC region to the other the pilots went over the approach that they would be flying into dulles international, they talked about the runway that they would be landing on, in this case runway 12 and the navigational aids that they would be using to land. After those discussions were done the captain handed the 727 off to the first officer. Now, he would be the one making the landing. As they got in touch with washington ATC the pilots discussed the possible routings that they might get from the controller and how they would go about the approach. At 10:51 am the controller wanted to know what heading flight 514 was on and the pilots told him that they were on a heading of 100 degrees, the controller wanted them to turn left to 090 degrees. Which would allow them to intercept the 300 radial of this VOR in the area called Armel. This would set them up nicely for a straight in appraoch to runway 12. Now that last bit had a bunch of terminology, a VOR is a beacon that pilots use to navigate and think of radials as 360 spokes coming off of the VOR beacon. Flying along a radial takes you away or towards from the VOR beacon in a particular way. With the landing information received the pilots started prepping the plane for landing. As they did the math needed for the landing a landing reference speed of 127 knots was set. All this while the crew went over even more details of the landing like the runway lights, the intersections that they would need to fly through and the airport diagram. As the plane left 11,000 feet for 8000 feet the captain asked the