[laughs]

[laughs]Uh, at some point before 3:49, the cockpit crew noticed that the horizontal stabilizer was jammed, or was jammed in the nose downward position.

Uh, I don't know why I'm gesturing as if, uh, people can see.

Never mind.

As they proceeded to open a radio link with Alaska Airlines dispatch and maintenance facilities in Seattle, and Alaska Operations and Maintenance in Los Angeles, where they were considering diverting to because they were relatively close to it at th- at this point, and were just sort of crossing into American airspace from Mexican airspace.

Uh, after spending a fair amount of time messing about with the switches, uh, both the one, the suitcase handles and the pickle switches, uh, running through their checklist and generally figuring out that there's not much that they could do to fix it, they start trying to plan out a diversion to Los Angeles, uh, given that the aircraft is still controllable, albeit requiring full manual control, and they also have to put a significant amount of body weight into actually pulling the, pulling the control column backwards.

... five years."

Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

Yes.

So they, they went ahead with installing this on all the aircraft they had originally agreed to.

The first unit was installed in an MD-11 in January 1997, with the plan to be to install the system in one to two planes per month up through February 1998, depending on maintenance schedules.

They weren't gonna bother unless it was in the hangar for something else, obviously.

Swissair, the Swiss Lottery, and the I- and IFT were contractually obligated to service the system until December 31st, 2003.

Swissair, uh, after introducing the system to public fanfare in January 19- 1997 with a ton of press photos, some of which I've already used several times, uh, would consider it a success.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

With, uh, with the exception of, uh, the next slide, which was to replace the, uh, 767, and also try and claw back the market share they had lost to the A330 very rapidly.

Um, i- inc- even in the US, notably, but also in Europe.

Um, you know, US Airways and Northwest were both major airlines by this point, and the A330, you could train their crews on the cockpit of an A320, and they could also use the cockpit of an A330.

It saved ev- money for everybody.

So suddenly, the Europeans are rather popular with airlines in the US, with the exception of those that want to preserve their American-only heritage, which at the time was a concerning amount of them.

Like, trying to think.

... my brand new 30-year-old plane? [laughs]