Air crash investigation ( called Mayday in some regions) is a really good series for a lot of reasons.

The gut wrenching drama, the triumph of man over (malfunctioning ) machine in a life or death struggle, the ‘needle in a haystack’ investigations, the human drama and tragedy. Another reason is just learning about the inner workings commercial flight which is something we completely take for granted these days. Not to mention the thorough logic to find the ‘smoking gun’.

Often the investigations find the faults in strange places, a weird widget, a badly designed procedure, poor maintenance of planes or airports, pilot error, etc.

Disturbingly of all though, many times it is the nefarious characters either non state actors or greedy corporates who measure the cost of human lives in the same cold accounting they use for counting the price of jet fuel or corporate/political advantage.

In most episodes the investigators are lauded for their determination in finding the cause of these disasters, and some investigations can take decades, the ultimate ‘cold case’ waiting for the technology or even the tiny scrap of metal to reveal the crucial clue.

But this particular episode differs from the script in that sense. One of the deceased passengers parents was an engineer determined for answers and willing to launch their own investigation which challenged the ‘official’ finding. Chillingly the fault found by the Campbells’ had been in existence since the original design of the aircraft.

Eventually their finding was accepted over the ‘official’ version, which tended to imply a refusal on the part of the various corporates and regulators to acknowledge a costly fault.

In a real twist of irony an air accident lawyer was on the ill fated flight, he wanted to get away from the air-crash industry on a planned holiday to Sydney. This lawyer explains the callous economics of  commercial aircraft safety.

In a weird twist of cognitive dissonance, the operators and vendors of the aircraft are perhaps a bigger risk to the safety of the air traveler than the ‘non state actor’, yet the passengers are routinely harassed and humiliated in weird security theater rituals “because of the 911”.

911? try asking about 811, your life is a “cost of doing business” to the corporates controlling the airlines.