Mayday - Air Disasters

Rescuers have to look to the past to solve the riddle of Flight 611, a China Airlines 747 that disappeared 20 minutes after taking off.

Shortly after leaving London Heathrow airport in December 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded above Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people. Investigators soon discovered that a bomb in the forward cargo compartment had taken down the plane.

On September 8, 1989, Partnair Flight 94, a charter from Oslo to Hamburg, suddenly begins to dive from 22 thousand feet. The aging propeller plane eventually crashes into the sea, killing all 55 people on board.

Find out what went wrong when a Kazakhstan Airlines jet and a Saudi Airways plane collided in the worst mid-air crash in aviation history, killing 349 people on November 12, 1996.

An attempt to rescue orphans from the chaos of war-torn Vietnam ended in tragedy when a US plane crashed on April 4, 1975, killing more than 150 people.

On August 6, 2005, a Tuninter ATR-72 ran out of fuel and was forced to ditch in the sea near Palermo, Italy. Of the 39 people on board, 16 lost their lives. The mistake was simply a wrong fuel gauge that sent higher fuel readings than the actual ones.

In January 2007, an Adam Air Boeing 737 crashed into the Makassar Strait killing 102 people on board. The pilots inadvertently disengaged the autopilot while trying to fix the inertial reference system, causing the plane to plunge to the water.

On Halloween 1994, an American Eagle ATR-72 suffered a loss of control and crashed near Roselawn, Indiana killing all 68 people on board. While flying in freezing conditions, ice accumulated on the wings.