This one doesn't just annoy me, it annoys Admiral Rickover. A 737 is leaving Cyprus en route Athens. Everything is peachy until it climbs up above 12k feet, when the "takeoff configuration" alarm goes off. This is a mystery, since the plane is long since beyond takeoff. And it's such a conundrum that the pilots contact the airline's ops department to ask for help. An airline engineer comes on the circuit and asks the pilots to check the PRESSURIZATION MODE SELECTOR and make sure it's selected to AUTO, not MANUAL. Instead, the pilot goes on some witch hunt for the circuit breaker to the air conditioning system. Meanwhile, back aft in the cabin, all the oxygen masks deployed. Now, you'd think that event would convey some valuable information to the pilots. Did a stewardess call up the flight deck and say, "Dudes, WTF is up with the O2 masks?" No. No she didn't. Meanwhile, the aeroplane keeps climbing on autopilot and puts itself in a holding pattern in the Athens approach. Everyone on board goes unconscious from hypoxia. Pilots and the passengers all expire from lack of oxygen. A couple F-16s take off to intercept and find out what's going on. They see the pilot seat empty and the first officer slumped over. But this is the "ghost flight." Plane keeps on flying in its holding pattern, burning fuel. But wait, there's activity in the cockpit. A civilian comes in with a portable O2 bottle. He jumps into the captain's seat and takes the controls. Too late. Plane's outta gas. Engines flame out, plane crashes. If the O2 bottle guy had come up sooner, he could have landed the plane, since he was a pilot himself. The delay remains a mystery. The O2 bottle dude is able to direct the plane away from the city and suburbs of Athens toward unpopulated areas. Plane crashes. Everybody dies. So what happened? The flight the night before had a suspected cabin leak, so the engineer did a pressure test of the cabin after leak repair. To do that, the cabin pressurization switch had to be taken from AUTO to MANUAL. After the test was successful, the switch should have been returned to AUTO. In MANUAL, the cabin would not be pressurized. So, at altitude, there was no oxygen. So, the first error was the engineer's, failing to re-line up the switch. The second was the pre-takeoff checklist work, which specifically called for that switch position to be checked and put into AUTO. The post-takeoff checklist also required verification of the switch position. Somehow, the pilots missed it. Look, you dudes had 2 separate checklists to verify this switch position and you humped the pooch on both of them. Then, the ops engineer done TOLE YOU to check the switch when you called him, and did you listen? No. No you did not. You fucked around with a circuit breaker to an air conditioning sytem. In the Nuclear Navy, a valve or switch being out-of-position is a gigantically big deal. People experience harsh discipline for fucking up switch and valve lineups. Because one little toggle switch out of position can kill you. youtube.com/watch?v=ve8hP9v5…