In An Instant

**MrBallen** (0:00)
Today's podcast will feature four stories that prove the line between life and death can disappear in an instant. The audio from all four of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called, This Is It Baby, and it's about a final recording found inside of a cockpit. The second story you'll hear is called, Don't Touch the Water, and it's about this seemingly innocent looking body of water that has a 100% mortality rate. The third story you'll hear is called, Out of Bounds, and it's about a boy who tries to retrieve a basketball in a restricted area. And the fourth and final story you'll hear is called, The Knocking, and it's about a nature photographer who faces a truly nightmare scenario. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious, delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak in to the Follow Buttons house and replace the stuffing in their pillows with cement. Okay, let's get into our first story called, This Is It, Baby.
On September 25th, 1978, a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 jet airliner entered San Diego airspace. Like all PSA aircraft, Flight 182 had a whimsical black button nose and smiley face painted underneath the cockpit. These so-called grinning birds were synonymous with the company's self-promoting ad campaign about them being the world's friendliest airline. But the airline was often criticized for being too friendly with their super low airfares, their kind of comic banter that the captains would employ through the intercom to passengers, and their female flight attendants who wore miniskirts and were instructed to make nice with the male passengers. Because the weather was clear, air traffic control directed Captain McFerrin and First Officer Fox to switch from instrument flight rules to visual flight rules procedures and to begin their final descent. Visual flight rules refers to pilots using their eyes to guide the plane. It's done when they're flying low, the weather's clear, and they can see the ground.
At 8:59 a.m. that morning, as PSA flight 182 descended down to 4,000 feet, air traffic control advised them of a Cessna, which is a small plane, that was ascending in their direction. Fox responded that they saw the Cessna, and so air traffic control came back and said to maintain visual separation. Maintain visual separation meant that despite ground radar-based controllers who could provide vertical and lateral separation criteria, the burden for maintaining separation fell solely on Captain MacFerrin and his crew. In layman's terms, air traffic control was telling them, don't lose sight of the Cessna. Inside the Cessna was a flight instructor named Martin Casey and his student who was a United States Marine named David Boswell.
As this little plane ascended, air traffic control informed them that PSA 182, who was right in front of them and slightly above them, they were on their descent. However, they had the Cessna in sight. As a result, the men inside of the Cessna did not take it upon themselves to actively begin looking for this jet. They assumed the pilots of PSA 182, who had them in sight, would avoid them. Back in PSA 182, there seemed to be some confusion in the cockpit. The two pilots were debating whether the Cessna they were watching fly lower than them past them on the right was the same Cessna that air traffic control had told them about. And at some point, they agreed, yep, that's got to be the same Cessna. And so they called in to air traffic control that it looks like the Cessna has passed us, they've flown past us on the right. Immediately after this transmission, the black box recorded the two pilots talking to each other, basically trying to convince the other that yes, that was definitely the right Cessna. But after a couple of minutes of reassuring themselves, one of them says, boy, I hope that was the right Cessna.
According to later testimony by the air traffic controller, who was in communication with the pilots of PSA 182 as they were on their final descent, he would say when Captain MacFerrin came over and said the Cessna has passed him on the right, he believed him, and he didn't think to check to make sure it was the right one. But in reality, the Cessna that MacFerrin and Fox had seen was the wrong one. The real Cessna they were supposed to maintain visual separation with, the one containing Casey and Boswell, was still ascending in the direct flight path of PSA 182, except now, this Cessna is in 182's blind spot below their nose, so they literally can't see each other. At 9.01 that morning, air traffic control got an alarm that PSA 182 and this Cessna are about to collide, but for some reason, the air traffic controller did not alert both aircraft. Instead, this controller only contacted the Cessna and didn't tell them this was a dire situation. They said, hey, there's traffic in your vicinity, but I'm pretty sure it's just PSA 182, and they already see you, so you're fine. So Casey and Boswell inside of the Cessna just continued to ascend.