Admiral Cloudberg & The Unnerving Frankness of Plane Crash Reddit
Known online as Admiral Cloudberg, American grad student Kylan Dempsey publishes a new aviation accident report to Reddit every week. His devoted readers can’t get enough.
By Elle Carroll
One of your biggest fears in life is a popular topic on Reddit. (Art: Zootghost)
Whatever you’re looking for, you can probably find it on Reddit — especially if you’re looking to watch something (or someone) go spectacularly badly.
There’s a spectrum of course, much of it relatively PG-rated.
Subreddit r/nononono, for instance, finds its unifying theme in “impending doom.” There’s also r/IdiotsInCars, a stalwartly popular regular on the platform’s front page, full of predominantly dash cam footage documenting driving decisions that range from comically questionable to outright disastrous.
Among the most intriguing interpretations of Reddit’s catastrophe-minded impulse is the subreddit r/CatastrophicFailure, a collection of articles and images that posit (not incorrectly) that nowhere and nothing is safe. Users post natural disasters — sinkholes in Canada, earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, flooded streets in Bangladesh, mudslides in Bolivia — and mechanical ones — trains derailing in Scotland and Germany, a carnival swing ride hurtling to the ground in China, buildings collapsing in Pakistan and Algeria, wind turbines splintering in Denmark. A coastal California highway crumbles into the sea, as does a cemetery in Italy.
Most posts, characteristically brief, link to Wikipedia articles and reported news stories. Recordings of local newsreels and security camera tapes abound, as does right-place-wrong-time bystander footage with its unmistakable one-handed tremble and the Greek chorus of observers expressing a level of collective shock and horrified amazement that hurdles over the language barrier.
Granted, there are rules. Visible fatalities and injuries must be labeled as such and tagged NSFW. Gore is frowned upon — “Objects, not people,” insist admins — even though the subreddit’s bodycount is predictably high. Some users express ambivalence about potential voyeuristic overtones. Videos of fatality-free failures are sometimes referred to as “guilt-free.” Memes aren’t allowed.
It can make for an odd dynamic. On a post commemorating the anniversary of the Station Nightclub fire in Rhode Island, users warn each other about the nightmarish quality of the linked video shot by a local news cameraman attending the show. (There are blood curdling screams audible beyond the wall of fire, then there is eerie silence. 100 people died, another 200-plus were injured. It is decidedly not “guilt-free.”)
Plane crashes (or, more accurately, aviation accidents) are particularly popular on Reddit’s disaster-minded corners, and the site’s de facto authority is Kylan Dempsey, a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado known to the internet as Admiral Cloudberg.
Starting in the fall of 2017, Dempsey has published one highly detailed aviation accident analysis every Saturday, steadily amassing a substantial plane crash analysis archive that spans decades, countries, and causes. The articles read simultaneously as gripping morality plays with a touch of melodrama and as acronym-heavy and startlingly meticulous dissections of human and mechanical error. And they are as compulsively readable as they are highly researched.
Far from the hyper-literal cataloging of accident reports done by government and aviation industry agencies, Dempsey’s titles channel the pulpy danger of James Bond films: “Compliance Impossible,” “Lightning From A Clear Sky,” “Contract to Kill.”
His noteworthy technical fluency belies the disciplined pacing of a suspense writer. He’s more than capable of using that reliable ol’ long form journalism trick: opening a story with an attention-grabbing prologue of the disaster to come, then leaping backwards to scenes prior to takeoff and error, pulling the reader along for the whole ride. He peels back layers of aircraft specifications, the training and states of mind of the pilots in question, airport curfews, hasty pre-takeoff inspections. He nods to any interesting passengers on board — the Russian professional hockey team Yaroslavl’ Lokomotiv, for instance. Then things really get going.
A 1953 plane crash in France during an air show, in which the pilot was seriously injured. (Flickr/Eric Salard)
Dempsey’s climaxes are chock-full of vivid and energetic imagery. Walls of fire tear through the cabin. Runway lights gleam wetly in the darkness. Planes plow headlong into ravines, slice the roofs off suburban houses, and peel open like bananas. Bodies and luggage fall on the Yugoslavian countryside like rain. On a frozen island north of Finland, a jet shatters against an icy precipice, setting off an avalanche and tumbling into the yawning chasm below.
Technically speaking, there is only one Admiral Cloudberg climax:
What goes up comes back down, often at a nose dive or into a rocky outcropping or well short of the runway.
But there’s a particular writerly alchemy at play: the dramatic imagery of his climaxes is hemmed in on all sides by a matter-of-fact coolness and (correct) belief that all crashes are the sum of their parts. The shock and awe always defers to a damning explanation of what exactly went wrong, then an explanation as to how and why it did. Planes don’t just fall out of the sky, and the weight of tragedy cannot preclude the necessity of investigation.
Related: “How A Minnesota Man Survived Being Trapped Under a Tree for 4 Days”
In a daily reader briefing for the New York Times, national correspondent Michael Wines deftly characterized Dempsey’s analysis of a breathtaking near-miss between two full passenger jets at San Francisco International Airport in 2017 as “dry but riveting — and terrifying.”
“An accident report is really dry and factual but all the material for a narrative is there: rising action, climax, denouement, et cetera. Why not write it that way?” Dempsey said from his dorm room in Boulder, Colorado, mere days after United flight 328 made national headlines when it showered mechanical equipment on a suburban neighborhood roughly 12 miles southeast of his university.
“It’s really interesting and I don’t have to sacrifice any of the factual aspects. That’s the thing that I think makes my articles in particular so popular.”
Many of Dempsey’s narratives close with cautionary tales. This, he contends, figuratively gesturing at the wreckage, is the price of error. It’s the price of poor training, unspecific communication, un-thorough inspections, lax rule-following, and hasty fixes.
Aviation is necessarily authoritarian, and unfortunately reactive. In an arena where you are not only the hapless plaything of physics (and darkness and the weather and fatigue), but also limited by the accuracy of your instruments and your eyesight, there can be no relaxing absolute vigilance. And unfortunately the most effective way to find out what can go wrong and how to fix it is for something to go wrong.
“I put a lesson at the end because the best way — and this is scientifically proven — for pilots and other aviation professionals to avoid ending up in accidents is to read about accidents that have already happened,” Dempsey said.
“Maybe some pilot reads this and says, ‘Gosh, I saw a pilot at my airline do that exact thing. Maybe I should keep an eye out for it.’ Who knows? There’s no point learning or writing about aircraft accidents if you’re not going to do something to try to raise awareness about how to prevent them.”
Dempsey does in fact receive emails and responses from aviation professionals, who he estimates comprise roughly 15 percent of his readership. He also uses their sources, particularly the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), whose public domain accident reports are indispensable to his research.
He combs through accident reports between classes during the week, writes his full narrative on Fridays, and publishes on Saturdays. The process starts over on Sunday, and he’s not keen on taking breaks. (Holidays are no excuse. To wit, his crash analyses of Garuda Indonesia flight 421 and Surinam Airlines flight 764 arrived on schedule on December 26 and January 2, respectively.)
No, because you are thinking it, he’s not afraid of flying. Dempsey supposes Admiral Cloudberg posts might even aid people in overcoming their fear of flying, counterintuitive as it sounds.
“Fear of flying is based on a lack of knowledge about what you should actually be afraid of. If you know all the possible ways which an airplane can crash, and all the ways which your airplane is not going to experience those things, a lot of the fear goes away,” he said. “[As in,] ‘I’ve read 100 Admiral Cloudberg articles and not one of them had a wing fall off the airplane so that must just not happen’ — which is correct!”
The wreck of a US Navy DC-3 plane that had to force landing in 1973 while flying over Iceland. (Flickr/Guiseppe Milo)
Also no, he doesn’t want to be a pilot. There is no aviation safety branch of his family tree. (“This is organic. I think my parents were concerned at first when I was much younger about how much I was interested in disasters,” he said.) He’s enrolled in a Russian Studies graduate program — no wonder he’s unfazed by the occasional NTSB accident report with hundreds of pages — and commercial piloting is at best a far-off career backup plan.
“It’s a hobby,” he shrugged. “There are lots of people who are aviation enthusiasts and not pilots.”
Enthusiasts is a fair word, although Dempsey and his ilk aren’t exactly enthusiastic in the traditional sense. A carefully analytic tone pervades Admiral Cloudberg stories and disaster subreddits. It assumes the exhaustive cataloging and publishing of the grisliest details can be managed away from our base voyeuristic impulses through a level-headed, stick-to-the-facts narrative. It posits that dispassionate dissection and dissemination is certainly more respectful to the dead than a sensationalist retelling.
Dempsey negotiates this in his own way. He’s happy to use his fiction-writing chops to illuminate the story arc he says is built into an accident report, but his articles are, in no uncertain terms, long and technical. The images of chewed-up planes on mountainsides are striking, but there’s no photos of carnage in the biblical sense.
“My articles weed out the people who are just in it for the voyeurism,” Dempsey explained.
“[If] they’re there for the Michael Bay explosions and whatnot, my articles don’t really give them that. I think those people don’t really have the patience to read what I write so they tend to self-select out of my readership.”
For those self-selecting into his readership, Dempsey is hard at work on a book. It’s as exhaustive as you might expect, although he says publication is a long way off.
“There's probably multiple volumes on human error. That’s like 80 percent of aircraft accidents,” he said. “I have a very long chapter on controlled flight into terrain, which I’ve written 175 pages.”
Somehow Dempsey still has time for non-plane crash pursuits. He enjoys Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones — “The books, not the show. The show ended badly.” — and the writing of Vanity Fair correspondent (and former pilot) William Langewiesche.
On January 15, 2009, a US Airways flight struck a flock of birds shortly after take-off, losing all engine power. The pilots opted to glide the plane into the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan, saving the lives of all 155 passengers on board. (Flickr/David Watts 1978)
Like all writers worth their salt, he has a perpetually unfinished novel languishing in a drawer. Maybe he’ll dig into that after the aviation book is finished. Or perhaps he’ll look into more earthbound catastrophes next, be it collapsed buildings or derailed trains: “I’m constantly tempted to write about other types of disasters.”
In the meantime, he shows no signs of tiring of aviation or acting as Reddit’s resident expert on plane crashes.
The same goes for his readers.
In the comments of “Reckless Faith: The crash of Crossair flight 3597” (in which a series of unfortunate events including a last-minute runway change culminates in a deadly crash outside of Zürich), users express their appreciation.
“I won’t start my weekend until I hop on here for the Admiral’s Saturday morning posts,” writes one user.
“I’m always excited to realise it’s a Saturday,” writes another. “Thanks Admiral.”
ELLE CARROLL IS A WRITER AND VISUAL ARTIST BASED IN BERLIN. FOLLOWER HER ON INSTAGRAM AND TWITTER.
ZOOTGHOST’S WORK REVOLVES AROUND SOCIAL COMMENTARY, DARK HUMOR, AND SKATEBOARDING.
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