How Pan Am's Criminal Negligence Crashed A Jet | Pan Am Flight 160

Donations are never expected but appreciated: paypal.me/miniaircrash
Join My Discord: / discord
707 Image: Rob Hodgkins
This is the story of Pan Am flight 160. On the 3rd of november 1973 a pan am cargo 707 was on the ground at JFK on its way to frankfurt with a stopover in prestwick scotland . The cargo on the flight was mostly innocuous but it held in its cargo holds 15000 pounds or 6800 kilos of chemicals. The plane took off with no issues whatsoever and once in the air the controllers asked flight 160 to climb and maintain 31000 feet.
As flight 160 continued its climb at 9:04 am the pilots noticed something strange. Smoke was starting to accumulate near the electrical compartment. The plane at this point was 100 miles east of montreal and the pilots thought that the best course of action would be to divert to boston. Immediately they let pan am operations or panop know about the smoke in the cockpit. Montreal center immediately cleared the plane to make a 180 degree turn. But as the plane made a bee line for boston the smoke in the cockpit was growing thicker and thicker. Within minutes the smoke was so thick that the pilots made another radio call to the operations center they said “the smoke is getting too thick”. The back of the cockpit was full of smoke at this time, no one knew how much time they had in the air before the fire would consume everything onboard. The controllers at boston knew that flight 160 was in some serious trouble so much so that they gave flight 160 preferential treatment even though they had not declared a formal emergency. Onboard the 707 things were going from bad to worse, the DME or the distance measuring equipment no longer worked and so the pilots asked the controllers for the distance boston. The 707 was starting to fail. The controller replied with "You're passing abeam, Pease Air Force Base, right now, s i r , and you're about 40 to 45 miles to the northwest of
Boston”. The controller asked the pilots if they wanted to declare an emergency but the pilots said “ Negative on the emergency, and may we have runway 33L”. The controllers were more than willing to give this crew anything they needed to get the burning plane on the ground, the pilots were now shutting down all non essential systems.
The crew and the controllers were coordinating on the best and fastest way to get the plane on the ground. Soon the plane was nearing Boston, they were almost down. The controller said “"Clipper 160, advise anytime you have the airport in sight. " But the crew didnt reply. The controller transmissitted again “"Clipper 160, this is Boston approach control. If you read, squawk ident on any transponder. I see your transponder just became inoperative. Continue
inbound now for runway 33 left, you're No. 1”. Still no reply. From the tower other controllers got a glimpse of flight 160, the left hand cockpit window was open and smoke was billowing out from it. The plane looked like it was barely under control. Yawing and rolling from side to side. Then it crashed short of the runway. The controller who had been talking to flight 160 transmitted “' A l l aircraft on the frequency, the airport is closed at Boston”. None of the 3 crew members on flight 160 survived.
The wreck of the plane showed tell tale signs of a fire onboard. Parts of the plane were caked with soot. The CVR showed that the pilots had donned the oxygen masks but the smoke still overcame them over the course of the flight. Just to put into context how hard it was for the crew, the crew asked if they could stay on the current radio frequency because it was too hard for them to see the radio stack through the smoke. But despite this they all remained calm and professional and kept working the problem at hand.