What Went Wrong: Countdown To Catastrophe Episode Rating Graph

New details shed more light on what went wrong the day an Italian Aerobatics Flight Team crashed into a crowd gathered to watch an air show in Germany.

A scandalous miscarriage of justice in the case of the freight train carrying GPL that derailed and exploded in the coastal Tuscan town of Viareggio. How safe are Europe's railways?

The story of how the supersonic Concorde aircraft crashed and burned into the aviation history books.

The whole truth about the downing of MH17 over Ukraine: who, how and why. Are passengers safe as they fly unknowingly over conflict zones and what can be done to improve air space safety?

An in depth review of Germany’s worst ever rail disaster and the engineering oversights that allowed it to happen.

A transport truck catches fire in the Mont Blanc tunnel, spreading an inferno that trapped dozens. Could it have been prevented and what has changed?

What led to the explosion of a massive warehouse of flammable material, which destroyed the city of Beirut, Lebanon

The story of the worst high-speed rail disaster in Spanish history, when on July 24th 2013 a high-speed train derailed on a ruve just outside the railway station of Santiago de Compostela, killing 79. Nearly a decade later, justice for the family members of the victims remains elusive, with the trial still grinding slowly through the Spanish courts.

The story of the deadly Kings Cross fire on the Piccadilly line of the London Underground on November 18th, 1987. A simple cigarette butt or match falling into the space between the wooden escalator and the highly greased mechanism may have started the inferno that killed 31 and severely burned 143 people commuting through the tube station that day.

The Ethopian Airlines Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya which crashed six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard. It is Ethiopia’s deadliest accident ever, and was the second MAX 8 accident in less than five months after the October 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash in Indonesia. This story investigates the computer error that led to the eventual grounding of the jet.

The story of one of the worst cable car disasters to hit Italy - an aerial tramway car that plummeted to the ground killing 14 of 15 passengers, the lone survivor a 5-year-old Israili child whose parents did not survive.

200 kilometers north of Aberdeen, Scotland in the North Sea, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded and sank on July 6th, 1988, killing 167 of the men on board, as well as two rescue workers whose ship was trapped in the burning, disintegrating oil rig. 61 workers escaped and survived - several tell their stories here. 30 bodies were never recovered.

The grounding of the Ever Given mega container ship in the middle of the Suez Canal on March 23, 2020 delayed billions in trade and highlighted the fragility of global supply chains. It took six days and two of the most powerful tugs in the world to pull the massive ship carrying nearly 20,000 containers free from the sand banks where she was wedged.

The sad story of Germanwings flight GWI18G, which crashed into a mountainside in an isolated region north of Nice, France after the pilot committed suicide after taking off from El Prat airport near Barcelona, Spain en route for Dusseldorf, Germany. All aboard the flight - including a group of German teenagers on a school trip and the copilot who was locked out of the cockpit but valiantly tried to save the plane - were killed in the crash. The German pilot had a long history of mental illness, and unfortunately it is is not the first time a pilot committed suicide with their passengers on board. This episode delves into what safety regulations are in place to protect the sanity of those piloting the planes we fly in every day.