Air Crash Investigation: Special Report

Some of the deadliest air crashes in history have been caused by simple misunderstandings, and it's a tiny error in the cockpit that brought tragedy to Quincy Airport in Illinois.

On every flight, passengers place their lives in the hands of their captain whose human flaws are enough to bring down an aircraft. When BEA Flight 548 crashes just moments after takeoff, investigators unravel a tragic combination of human factors centered around the captain.

It takes years of training to become an airline captain, but it's when a crisis strikes that a pilot really earns his stripes. An airliner is crippled after takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport, and the courageous captain pulls off an amphibious landing in the Hudson River.

Sometimes the trust between pilots and their planes breaks down, and the cockpit inadvertently becomes a struggle that pits man against machine. Eager crowds gather at an air show to watch the new pride of French aviation, but witness a fiery disaster instead.

Innocent lives are lost when civilian planes inadvertently become targets, but each incident teaches us vital lessons about how to better protect commercial airliners from the heat of war. Charred wreckage in the Sinai Desert is all that's left of a Russian passenger plane.

Compared to the number of suicides in the general population, suicidal pilots are almost statistically nonexistent. But when they do emerge from obscurity to unleash their horrific plans on innocent passengers, the destruction they inflict is epic. A 737 cruising above an Indonesian jungle suddenly plummets from the sky. An Airbus A320 crashes into the French Alps. And, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanishes over the South China Sea, and remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time.