On the 20th December 1995 American Airlines flight 965 whilst descending into Cali, Columbia having embarked from Miami, USA was to be a fateful flight. The plane crashed killing 159 people on board with only four survivors. Ex-Boeing 757 pilot, Captain Tristan Loraine remembers the crash all too well. 20 years later with the help of aviation experts and modern technology his investigation into toxic fume contamination could be the cause of the crash. As the film opens in US cinemas I was lucky enough to hear some of his expert opinion first hand.

Having watched American 965 and knowing your history as a pilot, I’m thinking that this documentary is quite a personal journey for you?

Yes, absolutely, I mean I often think about how it must have been in the last few moments of that flight and as a former airline captain, you know I’ve made mistakes, every pilot makes mistakes and it’s so easy to criticise people and say you know they did that and they did that. But I really wanted to get to the bottom of why they made the mistakes and what took me on the journey.

Had you got a suspicion from the beginning that this flight to Columbia from Miami, what could have potentially been the reason for the crash?

So when the crash happened in 1995 I was an airline captain and I had heard about the crash and they put it down to pilot error and I thought, yes pilots make errors but it was the same plane I was flying, very modern loads of safety features and it was also a really credible airline, it wasn’t some third world operator who was struggling with the finances to do a proper training or whatever. So I thought this doesn’t make sense but the report came out and they said it was pilot error and like you do in the industry you just assume that the people have done a proper job on the report. And then in 2001 when I was a health and safety rep I was introduced to this whole issue of the air supply on aeroplanes, where it comes from, how it gets contaminated, the chemicals you’re exposed to and how that can impair crew performance. And then I started to think, hang on a minute, let’s have a look at the Cali accident and so that’s how the journey started back in 2001. But then I was still flying and then when I was ill health retired in 2006, I started doing other projects but it was always in the back of my mind. And then when we started to make the film, Everybody Flies, I thought we should look at this Cali crash a bit more and the more we looked at it the more we realised it’s its own film. So the Everybody Flies film actually became two films and became American 965 and Everybody Flies. So Everybody Flies premiered at Raindance in 2019 before COVID, was in cinemas last year, and then COVID brought that to an end. And so this film is the prequel to that, because this is set in 1995.

As the film establishes toxic fume consumption could have played a very big part in what happen not just with this accident but many other accidents.

I think it is worth really emphasising to people watching this is that most people watching this programme would have been on an aeroplane as a passenger, or they may even be a private pilot. And it is important to remember when you’re on an aeroplane and you’re sitting there at 35,000 feet looking at the world go by, having a beer or a fizzy drink, and just thinking about life. Think about this question. Where does the air that you breathe at that time actually come from? Because most people don’t know. Well the air that you are breathing up there at 35,000 feet and outside the temperature is twice as cold as your home freezer and you just wouldn’t survive for a matter of seconds. The air that you’re breathing is coming unfiltered from the compression section in the engines, in a process called Bleed Air, because it is bled from the hot compression section. And that Bleed Air is then pumped into the cabin, cooled and then you breathe it in. Now this air gets contaminated with the lubricating oils in the engines and these lubricating oils aren’t like your car oils you may have put in. These oils contain all sorts of toxic additives, and they can of these oils states, ‘Do not breathe mist and vapour from heated product.’ Other cans say, ‘Suspected of causing Cancer a risk to the unborn.’ Etc, etc. So these are really hazardous chemicals. Now, people will say, ‘Nah, nah this can’t be possible, you know the air is filtered on aeroplanes.’ To reduce, to save money the amount of air they take per second from the engines about 20/30 years ago, they reduced it by half and they started to re-circulate the air. Now the re-circulated air goes through filters that will remove bacteria and viruses, which is good, and they are very efficient. But the chemicals we’re talking about are much smaller than bacteria viruses, so they go through these filters even in the re-circulated air as if they are not there. And that’s why when these events occur they can get worse you start breathing this stuff in and you can have crew impairment.  And people may say, ‘well how do I know if the air is contaminated?’ Well most of the chemicals have no odour and they are colourless, but some of them do have a very distinct smell and people describe it as a dirty sock smell. So if you are on an aeroplane and you get this very faint dirty sock smell, what that is is part of the oil that you are breathing. Planes don’t have any warning systems to warn when the air is contaminated, so this is a serious health and flight safety issue and that’s why we make the films to try and bring about change in an industry which I love and in an industry that the world needs, but an industry that has failed to address this important point.

And I think what the film actually addresses is with the people that you interview is just how much people really do care about aviation and aviation safety and the health of the passengers and the pilots and crew.

Absolutely, but ultimately the passengers they buy an airline ticket and they then pay extra money, whether they want to have express boarding, whether they want to have carryon baggage, whether they want to eat a meal, they are all options, or even what seat they want to sit in. But nobody says to them, ‘Would you pay another 50p or a pound to actually have clean air to breathe?’ ‘Cause what about the pregnant mother, doesn’t she deserve to make sure that her foetus isn’t breathing this stuff in? What about the business man who’s going to a high level meeting soon afterwards, doesn’t he deserve to go in cognitive, really, really sharp? You know it’s really interesting that a Formula One driver, you these guys are working on the absolute level of cognitive and mental 3D coordination, driving cars at high performance even. One of them, I won’t name who they are, actually would be seen often coming off an aeroplane having warn a face mask (an activated carbon face mask) just to make sure they couldn’t be breathing anything that may impair them cognitively later on.

And I think what I got as well from watching the film, and I suppose I want to ask you is about striking a balance as the film could have been incredibly dense in the sense of the kind of information, and scientific information that you’re reporting and talking about, however for me watching the film, it felt really like a human interest story and by talking to some of the survivors of the crash as well as loved ones that have been left behind, really adds that human element and human interest story. So with regards to structuring the documentary how much information do you give on a technical aspect balanced with adding that who human interest story?

Now that is a really, really good question because ultimately somebody is gonna watch a film for 96 minutes in this case and you’ve got to keep them emotionally and mentally engaged in the story and it’s so important to not overly complicate the message with technical facts and defects, explaining the defects of the aeroplane in great technical detail. So what we did is we focused on the,  to put the whole crash in layman’s terms without going in to too much detail which we feel we did successfully. However, some people said to us: “Well the film in many ways is like a court case, because you’re presenting evidence to a jury, so you need to present the evidence in a way that they will understand.” But then some people said: “Well actually why not give a bit more detail.” So in the making of American 965 we actually started to make a third documentary in the sequence which is very data intensive, some of your viewers may have seen the documentary 9/11 Inside Job, and 9/11 Inside Job is a documentary that alleges that the world trade 9/11 was all a government conspiracy. But the point is in that film they showed document, after document, after document all the evidence, that’s their argument. So in this new film which is voiced over by Marina Sirtis from Star Trek which we were really glad to have on board, is we show all the evidence that the industry has really known to support the American 965 stories, so it’s there for people to look at if they really want to know the fine print.

Obviously you’ve got lots of contacts within the industry because of your background as a captain and a pilot working with the health and safety of airlines. Was it difficult for you to then get them to talk on camera about what their assertions are and what their finds were? Was it tricky or were they volunteering because they want this to be made more public? Because at the end of the day, these are very powerful companies that are not pulling their finger out and doing what they need to do so secure passenger safety.

Well indeed, that’s another good question. Some people you would speak to on the phone and you would tell them what you were doing and immediately they were saying I don’t want to have anything to do with it, I’m not allowed to talk or whoever someone was employed with wouldn’t allow them to do it. Other people you’ve ring thinking there’s no way they would be willing to talk and they were surprisingly quite open about it. So it’s a balance, there’s a lot of people we communicated with that we might have talked with, and there’s also one particular person we did a Zoom call with and we told them what our theory was, we then said we’re gonna send you our whole file with everything in there, please have a look at it and let us know your thoughts. And then went to bed and then the next morning I had an email from the person saying: “Your theory could not have possibly have happened, I don’t want to have anything to do with the film, please don’t contact me again basically.” Which is really interesting because I never actually sent them the information to look at, which means that they spoke to somebody after our call who got to them and said, ‘Don’t get involved.’ Or whatever, they were warned off. So there was a lot of different people. But you know the film, everything in the film is factual, it’s all factual data, so the facts speak for themselves really.