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Flight 965 takes off an hour after sunset and is cleared to climb to a flight altitude of 37,000 feet. it's december 20th, 1995. in a little over three hours, the twin engine boeing 757 is scheduled to land in cali, colombia just in time for the holidays. >> it was my birthday, my 21st birthday. so the trip to go back home to columbia was a gift for my birthday and to celebrate christmas and new year's. mercedes ramirez's family was on standby because of a two-hour delay because of a snowstorm in the northeast. they end up getting the last three seats. miami based crew captain spots lights dow...

The captain instructs the flight attendant to prepare for a landing. then air traffic control and the captain accepts a runway change that will speed up their arrival time, but first officer don williams says he'll have to scramble to get down in time for the shorter approach. >> modern jets are so aerodynamically efficient, one of the greatest challenges in flying them is getting them down and getting them to slow down. speed breaks or flight spoilers are devices used to help increase the descent rate to help it slow down. >> the captain deploys 965 speed brakes and types in the letter r for ...

Rozo navigational beacon near cali's airport. but it interpreted the r as a beacon 132 miles to the east and behind the plane. the mistake reroutes flight 965 directly into a 9,000 foot mountain. >> had they typed in rozo, that way point would have come up. but they didn't know that. and that was one of the lessons learned coming out of this accident. >> columbia's civil aviation authority releases its final report in september of 1996 and finds probable cause was primarily pilot error. the flight crew didn't adequately plan and execute their approach and lacked situational awareness. and they...

The effectiveness of the ground proximity warning equipment to provide pilots with an earlier warning than the 12 second they had on flight 965. >> the cali accident was one of the true industry game changers. after this accident the recognition of the critical need for predictive technology revolutionized aviation safety and the control rate accident type went down dramatically. >> out of all of the planes that were in the sky that day, why, why our plane? why us? >> mercedes ramirez still struggles to make sense of a world without the two cherished people she lost that night. >> i would do a...

Cite the crews's fail your to -- failure to retract the speed brakes, which prevented flight 965 from gaining enough altitude during its escape maneuver. >> out of this accident came a design change that if you called for maximum power for an escape maneuver, that if the speed brakes were deployed, that they would automatically retract. >> american airlines agrees pilot error led to the crash but is disappointed investigators did not also fault flight management computers and the lack of a radar approach. the ntsb releases its own recommendations a month later that the faa develop a mandatory ...