Cleared For Take-Off? (Tenerife Air Disaster ...

Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints. Was General Magic really doomed from the start, and what does its fate tell us about AI, drug discovery and our love lives? David Epstein, author of ...  Show more

It's 1990. A new company called General Magic is going to build its vision of the future: the smart phone. They have talent, almost unlimited cash, and a 15 year head start on the iPhone. What could go wrong? This episode was based, with permission, on David Epstein's book Inside ...  Show more

Days before Christmas 1988, scorched metal rained from the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Its source: Pan Am flight 103, headed from London to New York. The explosion killed 270 people and was declared a terrorist attack by investigators. The only question: Who was resp ...  Show more

This week, Rebecca talks with Jon Ziomek, an Associated Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University and co-author of Collision on Tenerife: The How and Why of the World's Worst Aviation Disaster about who he thinks is to blame for this terrible tragedy. Then, Fact Checker Chris ...  Show more

When a British Airways flight carrying 248 passengers took off one evening in 1982 heading from Kuala Lampur to Australia, everything seemed fine. But two hours later all of the jumbo jet’s engines shut down and no one knew why. The plane had flown into the ash cloud of the erupt ...  Show more

Listeners, strap yourselves in. The late 20th century was an era of glamorous air travel, where you could saunter right through to the plane and buy your ticket in your seat (alongside your martini). But, alongside the glamour was a slew of sky-jackings, with hundreds of hijackin ...  Show more