The Unqualified Captain That Killed 176 People | Suriname Airways Flight 764

Help Support The Channel!:   / miniaci   Join My Discord:   / discord   This is the story of surinam airways flight 764. On the 7th of june 1989 an american DC8 owned by surname airways limited was to fly from amsterdam's schiphol airport to suriname. Flight 764 departed amsterdam at 11:35 pm and they expected to get to suriname at about 4:30 am local time give or take a few minutes. The flight there was not an issue, everything went as it should the weather cooeprated and the passengers onboard had a generally good time. But that was all about to change, 20 minutes before they got to paramaribo, suriname. The pilots got a routine weather report. Now the winds were calm but the visibility left a lot to be desired, they only had about 900 meters or about 3000 feet of visibility. Not the best when youre landing at night and they need to carry out a VOR/DME approach to the airport. For the uninitiated thats a comparatively hard approach to a runway where you have to use beacons to line yourself up with the runway. Now the thing to note is that theres a higher margin of error than compared to something like an ILS approach. Which is comparatively precise. Today though the pilots would be landing on runway 10. But in the cockpit things were starting to get tense the captain was expecting better conditions at the airport. He asked his first officer “What happened with the 6 kilometers of visibility ?” the pilots then talked about the the minima or the minimums for this approach. Basically if the weather got too bad then theyd have to discontinue this approach and then a) wait around for the weather to get better or b) go to another airport nearby that had better weather. The thing is the airport at paramaribo had an ILS that would be super useful in this situation but it was out of order At this time in the cockpit the pilots were peering out into the darkness trying to pierce through the fog. They could see a town off in the distance, maybe the fog wasn't as bad as they thought it would be after all. Then they saw the airport, the first officer said “ you can see the airport down there no problem, thats right here visibility wont be a problem”. I imagine that he probably sounded a bit relived to see the airport so clearly. Maybe this landing wouldn't be as challenging as they thought it would be. They decided to make a pass over the airport and then land. At 9:48 the pilots got the all clear to perform the DME/VOR approach to paramaribo. In the darkness over suriname the pilots worked to intercept the right VOR radial that would lead the massive jet towards the airport. At this point they were at 9 DME and the pilots agreed to turn when they hit 7 DME. The first officer was coaching the captain on what to do he said things like “just keep on coming around on the 30 degree bank there, youll be alright”. The flight engineer called out 2000 feet, the captain just reacted with huh? “ The first officer was still giving the captain pointers on how to fly he said “ its a level out, its about 10 degrees to the right, level out now and you should be fine”. But there was some confusion in the cockpit, they didnt really have a good idea on how far out they were from the airport. But then the airport came into view and the first officer said “runways at 12 o clock’, right next to the runway was the fog bank that they had been warned about, with them having a tentative visual on the runway the captain asked the airport authorities to crank up the brightness on the runway lights. But in the cockpit, ground proximity warning alarms started to go off, this plane was too close to the ground. The pilots stayed on the approach despite the plane warning them that they were wayy too close to the ground. The first officer called 200 feet, but the plane kept descending. The plane was not supposed to be this low, they were in grave danger but strangely no one made any attempt to get the plane put of the danger that it was in. then the sounds of the plane striking the trees and then silence. Flight 764 had crashed short of the runway at paramaribo and of the 187 people onboard only 11 people suivived. Most investigations rely on the flight data recorder to get a clear idea of what happened in the last few moments of a flight that crashed. That data is super important when, but in this case the most important part of the data the altitude information was not recorded by the FDR, which was a massive blow to the investigators. So the investigators had to get creative to get a rough idea