Radar Contact Lost: The Podcast Dave Gorham

Send us a Text Message.On Tuesday morning, December 5, 1978, 22 people were rescued off the side of a high Colorado mountain in the southern regions of the Rocky Mountains. They had survived the frigid night at an altitude above 10,000 feet (over 3,000 meters). This was in the midst of a snowstorm, with temperatures well below freezing and winds howling above 30 miles per hour (that’s nearly 50 kilometers per hour). There was only minimal shelter. Some reports estimated the snow to be 8 feet ...

Send us a Text Message.On February 3, 1959, a small, single-engine, 4-passenger plane took off from a remote airfield in rural Iowa. It was after midnight. It was snowing. It was windy. Moments later, the plane rolled over and flew into the ground at approximately 170mph – or about 275 kph. The 21-year-old pilot and the three passengers were killed on impact. The injuries to all four were horrific. This small crash, on a cold winter night, would reverberate through history – not only to this ...

Send us a Text Message.On the evening of February 12, 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 was on final approach to Runway 23 at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Buffalo, New York. It was dark, it was snowing, it was windy and the pilots had noted the accumulation of ice on the wings and windshield of the 78-seat regional airliner. Still, the pilots were not under undue stress as the cockpit voice recorders indicated a casual, unhurried atmosphere, there was even some unrelated chit-chat ...

Send us a Text Message.On final approach to Havana’s José Martí International Airport in 1977, the Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-62M with 69 people on board, descended below the clouds and the pilot immediately was confronted with power lines between the plane and the runway – and the runway was close. The pilot attempted to pull the nose up to avoid the powerlines, but the emergency maneuver was not enough – the plane clipped the power lines and the steel-reinforced cables severed the vertical stabil...

Send us a Text Message.At just before 2 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, March 5, 1966, British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 911, took off from Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. Bound for Hong Kong, the Boeing 707 broke apart in mid-air, just 15 minutes after departure. The crash left no survivors. The weather conditions were not an issue – at least, nothing obvious: there were no thunderstorms, no typhoons, there was no rain or snow. In fact, it was a sunny, clear, cloud-free...

Send us a Text Message.Today’s episode, “When a Volcano Silenced a Boeing 747 Over the Indian Ocean," is the heart-stopping tale of a commercial jetliner – a Boeing 747 – that, contrary to every other episode in this podcast series, did not crash. However, the world’s largest passenger jet at the time came about as close to a spectacular and deadly crash as it could, before the crew saved the plane and the lives of everyone on board from near-certain destruction. Even after the plane landed s...