Breaking Aviation's Biggest Myth: An Interview with Christine Negroni

The following interview highlights the most revealing moments from the conversation with veteran crash investigator Christine Negroni, author of The Crash Detectives, about what really drives aviation safety—and what every organization can learn from it.

Jowanza:

Today, we're cracking open the black box of aviation risk with one of the world's foremost crash investigators, Christine Negroni. Christine has reported on aviation disasters for over two decades for the New York Times, CNN, ABC News, and many more. She's the author of the bestselling book, The Crash Detectives, where she digs into the world's most mysterious air accidents from TWA 800 to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. 

In some of your interviews, you've mentioned you didn't pay much attention to aviation until covering the TWA Flight 800 incident from CNN in 1996. What is it about that crashing that made you think, I can't walk away from the story?

Christine Negroni: 

Hmm. I like that question. I did get my start with the crash of TWA flight 800, and I was not in any way involved in the aviation world other than as a traveler at the time that that airplane crashed. I was working for CNN, as you noted in my introduction, and was sent out to Long Island, where the wreckage of the plane, which crashed into the Atlantic, was being brought in. I spent six weeks out there in those initial days. The thing that captivated me about TWA 800 and led me to the statement that you asked me about, like, I can't walk away from this. There was so much uncertainty about the accident in the public's mind. And there was so much discussion about: Was it a bomb? Was it a missile? Was something wrong with the airplane? So much controversy. And while that doesn't seem unusual now in 2025, it sure was uncommon in 1996. So I looked at all that was going on and thought: I don't know of a more intellectually engaging, socially fascinating story that I've covered in Fat Point, 25 years of being a television correspondent. And so it really just drew me in.

Look, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you—a lot of it was ego because I really did feel like I had an understanding of this story. Not because I was so smart, but because people were giving me information and backing it up with facts and previous events, saying, "Look, this is where we're looking, and where we're looking was not a criminal act."

CNN would consistently say, "Whatever you report, we are going to go get the FBI's position and balance your stories with theirs." Since the nineties, we have come up with this idea of false equivalencies, right? If you constantly go to get somebody to challenge your opinion with a contrary opinion, that doesn't necessarily mean the contrary opinion should be given equal weight. In this case, the FBI would continue to insist all theories were on the table, saying they were inches away from finding that "football-sized piece of evidence" that would show this was a criminal act. But they weren't. They were given false equivalency, and it was very frustrating because everything I said, if the FBI said something contrary, we had to give that equal weight. And that's wrong.

Jowanza: That's a fascinating example of how media coverage can shape public perception. You eventually wrote "Deadly Departure" about TWA 800. What drove you to write that book?

Christine: People were telling me to write a book, for one. I was probably nine months to a year into reporting on Flight 800 when I remember sitting with another reporter and saying, "No one's writing a book about this. It's odd, right? This is such a great story." The next thing that happened was I saw in the newspaper that she had pitched a book and got a publisher before I did, which was very frustrating. Don't share your secrets too broadly!

But the thing I thought about TWA 800—it sounds awful to say it, but I felt I was right. I still do. And that message should get out there. This design flaw existed on 8,000 airplanes. Everything in the Boeing fleet that began with seven—the 757, the 767, the 777, the 747, and the 737. They all had the same design. They were all at potential risk of having an explosion in flight as TWA-800 had.

Jowanza: Eight thousand airplanes with the same flaw—that's staggering. How does something like this perpetuate within an organization tasked with building planes safely?

Christine: This is a huge question for industrial risk. I think it's a sort of corporate arrogance, but I don't mean intentional arrogance. I think it's just a matter of—if I feel confident about my work, how do you think a company like Boeing feels? They've sent rockets into space! There's a well-earned corporate arrogance that does not prevent underlying fissures from developing.

How do we make sure we don't allow flaws to creep in? You cannot stay on it without having input from the most senior executives and a mandate from the very head of the company and board of directors all the way down to the person picking up trash in the parking lot. It has to be that vertical and integrated. Yes, it happens, and I think it happens everywhere. It's not just aviation.

Jowanza: Let's shift to your other major work, "The Crash Detectives," which covers Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. When did you realize this would make for an compelling book?

Christine: The interesting part about Malaysia 370 is that I had a book agent reach out to me saying she wanted a book about aviation. She was very hot to sell a book like that, and publishers wanted it. Did I have a book I wanted to write? There were no disasters on the horizon that I could see, and I did have a book I wanted to write called "Flying Lessons"—basically taking all the factors that make aviation safety so effective and asking how we can apply this to our personal lives, professional lives, industrial lives.

I was still in Malaysia, probably 10 days in, when we put together that proposal and sent it out. I had a contract to write that book before I even left Malaysia. So it wasn't that I wanted to write about Malaysia 370 initially because I didn't know enough at the time. But I'm so glad I did, because that became one of these stories where facts were one thing, but the story was another, and the two didn't intersect very often.

Jowanza: You developed a controversial theory about MH370—that it was hypoxia rather than pilot suicide. Can you walk us through that?

Christine: People think that without the black boxes in Malaysia 370, we'll never know what happened. That's not true. The black boxes are a source of critical information, but that's not the only information air accident investigators use. There's tons of information on the ground, in maintenance records, in previous events with the aircraft model. That satellite data, the radar data—how do we even know this airplane flew south instead of north? The black boxes didn't tell us that. The satellite data did.

I believe there was a depressurization event, probably rapid depressurization. The first officer was alone in the cockpit—this young 27, 28-year-old who'd just gotten qualified on the 777. The captain goes out, I think to go to the bathroom. He's a 51, 52-year-old man, coffee drinker, smoker. He's been in the airplane two hours already. So he's in the bathroom when this event happens, and I don't believe he was able to get back to the flight deck.

The first officer puts on his mask because that's what pilots are trained to do. The plane takes action, turns around, heads back—initially like it's going back to Kuala Lumpur. So I think he had an issue and realized he had an issue. But then we lose the transponder. The press initially said the pilots turned off the transponder, but there's no way of knowing that. All we know is the transponder stopped functioning.

Jowanza: How do you think the transponder issue happened?

Christine: The first officer had rapid depressurization, puts on his mask, but has trembling extremities—that's what happens with hypoxia. He reaches over to dial 7700, which is the emergency frequency, to say he has an emergency, and inadvertently puts the transponder into standby. That removes the transponder from air traffic controllers. It would appear as if he turned off the transponder, but did he intend to? That's a whole different ballgame. I don't think he did.

He starts the airplane back, then all hell breaks loose. It goes this way, that way. It never descends. Two things a pilot's supposed to do in depressurization: put on the mask, descend to a lower altitude. He put on the mask, turned around, but did not descend. If he had his mask on and wasn't functioning properly, what does that tell you? Even though he had his mask on, he wasn't getting full 100% oxygen under pressure. Essentially, he was in the condition of the passengers in the back—enough to make decisions, not enough to make good decisions.

Jowanza: What evidence supports this hypoxia theory?

Christine: Just before that flight took off, both canisters that supply emergency oxygen to the pilots were removed from the airplane, serviced, and brought back on. I spoke to pilots who told me that pilots consistently do not put on their oxygen mask even though they're supposed to above 25,000 feet. When pilots are hypoxic, they do things that make no sense—that's consistent.

In my book, I go into several fatal events where pilots did the wrong thing, none of which were considered pilot suicides. They were considered pilot incapacitation due to hypoxia. Why is this one different? It follows all the trail of the other ones. What's different about this one is that it's two pilots who are Muslim. I can't imagine any other reason why this has become such a murder-suicide theory.

Jowanza: That's a troubling observation about bias in investigations. Do you see this pattern in other cases?

Christine: There's a Western bias against people from other countries who they think are stupider than they are. Do the Indonesians know about flying? What do the Ethiopians know about flying? We see this repeatedly when there are accidents in these countries. Go back to the 737 MAX—what did you see all over the internet? That those "stupid pilots" didn't know how to manage a very simple problem that we here in America would have been able to solve.

Even now, even with Boeing criminally charged with lying to the FAA about software and withholding from pilots information they needed to know to successfully manage this problem—even now that that's an established fact that Boeing admitted to—you still have people saying the pilots should have been able to handle it. I'm sorry, but Ethiopian, Indonesian—they're brown people. How do they know how to fly? I think there's an inherent racism in it, to be perfectly honest with you.

Jowanza: Looking at your decades of investigation, how do you weigh human factors versus technological factors in aviation accidents?

Christine: Over the years, there's been a profound shift. In the early days of aviation, things happened to the airplane—they were making a machine they'd never made before and sending it up into the air with people on board. Now we've shifted from "the issue is the safety of the machine" to "the issue is the capabilities of the human."

But I want to be clear: People think "machine or pilot." The pilot is one of many humans, many kinds of professions that keep an airplane safely flying. The machines are made by humans. Every part of aviation is human-centered because that machine didn't make itself. When we talk about human factors, it's all human factors.

The people who say it's okay to dispatch that airplane—that's a human decision based on human assessment. The people who work on that airplane follow rules and guidelines created by humans, doing them in processes where they work with other humans. All the communication between and among those humans is human-based.

Jowanza: How does increasing automation change this dynamic?

Christine: Now we're in the airplane, and it's increasingly computerized. The pilot no longer does more work traditionally done by the pilot because it's boring and repetitive—why not let a machine do that work? So the pilot is less and less engaged with the flight, perhaps not by choice, but by the way the plane is designed and company rules that say, "Use the automation rather than your own piloting skills."

This leads to complacency and disengagement of the human from the machine. What's so integral to safety is that the human and machine work in concert. But now we've separated them and put computers in the middle. All this evolution makes the human factor the dominant aspect of aviation safety.

The challenge is: how do you train someone to be an effective monitor when human factor science says humans are not effective monitors? We don't do it well. How do we become effective monitors? Because if we're going into systems where the human is the monitor, that's not going to work too well.

Jowanza: What's the biggest lesson here for risk managers in other industries?

Christine: These kinds of industries with the same problem in different arenas could actually learn from each other. I'm a big proponent of saying everybody should learn from aviation, but it sounds like other industries are dealing with similar challenges. Why not have a larger discussion—not with flying necessarily being dominant, but with all industries? How do you put all that together?

The fundamental insight is this: it's all human factors. Even with AI, humans create the AI. Until machines make themselves—and I hope I'm not alive when that happens—this will always be the case. The key is recognizing that humans are embedded at every level of your systems and training them accordingly.

Jowanza: Any final thoughts on what makes aviation so uniquely safe despite these challenges?

Christine: Aviation wouldn't even make the list if I were ranking your health and safety risks. It is so safe. When we talk about aviation safety, people think it's because we have a big problem. We don't. But we don't want a big problem to start because we're sitting around thinking about how safe it is. The only way aviation can stay as safe as it is today is by constantly challenging it.

You're more at risk when you get in your car and drive somewhere. You're much more at risk walking across the street looking at your device and getting hit by a car. In America, you're hundreds of times more at risk from guns. We're living more in the Wild West than we are in an aviation safety threat environment.

The lesson is vigilance without complacency—that's the aviation safety paradox, and it's what every high-risk industry needs to master.

The full conversation is available on Industrial Risk: Beyond the Blueprint podcast.