Desperate Escape: American 965 (Patreon)

A few days before Christmas in 1995, the pilots of an American Airlines Boeing 757 wound up lost over the Andes mountains in South America. Under pressure to make it to the airport quickly, they began to make mistakes. What started out as a simple lapse in judgement, quickly snowballed into a series of critical errors, each one compounded by the one before it. In a few short minutes, these mistakes would result in the deaths of nearly everyone onboard.

This is the story of American Airlines flight 965.

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This video was created with reference to publicly available sources, in particular, the Final Report:

https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/1056.pdf

All music licensed through Epidemic Sound

Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL.

American Airlines 757 Livery: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/40975-old-american-airlines-for-flight-factor-757-200-v2-professional-extended-xp-11/

Pictures:

787:

Masahiro TAKAGI from Ichikawa, Chiba, Japan, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A320:

Ken Fielding/https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenfielding, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A330:

JetPix (GFDL 1.2 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html> or GFDL 1.2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html), via Wikimedia Commons

A340:

Iberia Airlines, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

AAL965 Crash site pictures:

FAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons