Crash landing

Waterloo Road (BBC1, 8pm)

Battle Castle with Dan Snow (Discovery Channel, 9pm)

MOST people’s experience of plane crashes is seeing them on news reports or depicted in films or TV dramas.

Certainly fictional recreations can be spectacular, such as the opening scenes of Fearless, the movie in which a character played by Jeff Bridges believes he is indestructible after walking away unscathed from a disaster. And the start of the TV series Lost.

As exciting as they were, we all know they were created by special effects, either on a computer or in the safety of a Hollywood sound stage. But now, in the documentary The Plane Crash, we can see in devastating detail exactly what happens when a 170-seat Boeing 727 passenger jet falls from the sky, but without the cost to human life usually associated with such events.

The idea behind the programme is to provide scientists with information that could improve passenger safety.

Captain James “Jim Bob” Slocum will pilot the aircraft, nicknamed Big Flo, on her final flight, which will end with a forced landing in a remote and uninhabited area of the Mexican desert.

Everything that happens will be recorded.

“This is a unique experience to be able to see the aircraft beforehand and watch it crash,” says former senior air crash investigator Anne Evans, whose previous projects have included piecing togetherwhat happened at Lockerbie, Kegworthand other aircraft disasters worldwide.

She added: “We want something that is survivable. It has got to be a bit heavier than a normal landing, but not so heavy that the aircraft is destroyed and we have lost everything.”

Plane crashes are, of course, a rare event. Even Evans, with her vast experience of the aftermath of one, has never seen a crash happen first hand, and no manufacturer has ever tested one of their aircraft in this way before.

“We crash cars all the time, we don’t do that with planes to see if we can make them safer, which is what makes this such a unique opportunity,” says Professor Cynthia Bir, a bio-mechanist who is also involved in the project.

“Seeing the crash was really fantastic,” says Dr Tom Barth, a survivability expert from the National Transportation Safety Board. “This validates all the work that has been done in aviation safety over the past 20 years.”

Plane crash survivors will also be interviewed in an attempt to discover how seemingly small decisions can mean the difference between life and death.

WATERLOO Road has swapped Rochdale’s rain and windswept streets for Greenock’s rain and windswept streets, but all of the changes have taken some time to sink in.

In fact, the characters themselves are coping with the move far better than those of us watching at home.

There is a familiar face joining the cast this week who will play a big part in Chalky’s life. Tommy Knight starred as the titular character’s adopted son, Luke, in The Sarah Jane Adventures, and here portrays newcomer Kevin.

He draws attention to himself, and Chalky finds him particularly intriguing.

He suspects the lad is hiding something (aren’t all pupils at school?) and may be more intelligent than he’s letting on.

Maybe he really is Luke Smith who was, after all, a boy genius.

PEOPLE say “if walls could talk...”, but sometimes they can tell us more than you might think. The world is littered with medieval fortifications of one form or another – some still standing, others crumbling relics of what they once were.

But what can they tell us about what life was like during their heyday?

In the enlightening series, Battle Castle with Dan Snow the historian explores some of these structures and examines the sieges they resisted, re-enacting battles that changed history.

They were designed to hold off attack for the longest time possible, keeping marauding hordes at bay while providing a vantage point from which defending armies could strike back.

But how did it feel for those at the sharp end? Dan begins with the 1271 attack on the Crac des Chevaliers, a military base for the Crusaders in what is now Syria, by Baibars, the sultan of Egypt, and his massive army.