Why this site exists
There are thousands of air crash documentaries on YouTube. They are scattered across many channels, often under dramatic titles, and in no particular order. The official reports that explain what really happened are long PDF documents written for specialists. Nothing ties together the videos about one accident, its timeline, the key facts and what changed afterwards.
What we do about it
- One page per accident. Each event page gathers the date, the aircraft, the official finding and a timeline, with the videos that explain it, from investigators’ own animations to documentaries and pilots’ analyses.
- Videos in order. Every video is filed under its event and under topics such as causes, aircraft types and phases of flight, so you can follow one subject across many accidents.
- Written guides. Our guides explain the ideas that come up again and again, such as how investigations work, what a flight recorder does and what changed after a famous accident.
- Checked facts. Every fact is checked against the official investigation report and the sources cited on the page. How we check facts explains the process.
These are real accidents, and people lost their lives in most of them. We write calmly, we follow the investigators’ findings, and we do not speculate beyond them.
Who writes this
Articles are published by the Flights Gone Wrong editorial team under four house bylines. Each byline has its own angle, so one subject can be seen from the cockpit, the hangar, the history books or the rule book. They are pen names: their profiles say what each one covers and how they write, not a career.
Ruth Calloway
Crew decisions and human factors
Ruth Calloway writes about the people at the centre of an accident: the crew, the controllers and the decisions they made with what they knew at the time. Her guides follow the cockpit voice recorder transcripts and the human-factors findings of the final reports, and explain ideas such as crew resource management, workload and the Swiss cheese model in plain words. She reports error in the investigators' own terms, without blame, and closes each piece with what crews were taught differently afterwards.
Tomasz Wren
Engineering and what failed
Tomasz Wren covers the engineering side of air accidents: the part that failed, how it failed and what the design, maintenance or materials had to do with it. His guides walk through each failure step by step, explain the hardware in plain comparisons, and keep to the wording of the final report, including its "probably" and "most likely". He is most at home with structures, engines, fire and pressurisation, and ends every piece with the fix: the design change, inspection or directive that followed.
Ines Marchetti
History, timelines and the long view
Ines Marchetti writes the history and timeline pieces: how an aircraft type's record built up, how one decade's accidents differed from the next, and how a disputed case was eventually settled. Her guides are built on dates, with a timeline at the centre, and they keep what people believed at the time apart from what investigators later found. She also looks after the reference pages, such as the glossary and the guide to documentary channels, and closes each piece with a dated note on where things stand now.
Owen Sato
Regulation and what changed afterwards
Owen Sato follows what happens after the final report: the safety recommendations, the new rules and equipment, and the slow work of putting them in place. His guides explain how investigations work and who runs them, how to read a report's findings, and how a single accident led to changes such as collision-avoidance systems, wind-shear alerts and inspections of aging aircraft. He names the documents behind each change, notes when a recommendation took years, and always ends with what changed.
More about how we work
Videos play from their creators’ own YouTube channels, with the channel credited on every page. This site is independent and is not affiliated with any airline, manufacturer, investigating body or video creator named on it.