I doubt many would find this anywhere near as interesting as I did, but on the off chance someone might, this thing really sucked me in last night. I wound up listening for 2 hours or so, well past my bedtime (and intend to continue it later). Somebody put together ~6 hours of the flight director loop from the Apollo 13 accident, beginning about five minutes prior to the kaboom. You basically hear everything that was done afterward, in real time, and from the perspective of the top dog; Krantz at first and Glenn Lunney for most of it. You hear CAPCOM and whichever astronaut he's talking to in the background (CAPCOM sat next to FLIGHT), but what you're listening to is FLIGHT and whichever controller he's engaging. We all know the story, but hearing it like this is both fascinating as hell and more than a little dramatic without the need for Imagine Entertainment to make it so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWfnY9cRXO4Some quick takeaways:
The whole thing developed very slowly. Ron Howard and The Discovery Channel make it seem like they're all over it from the second it goes bang. In reality it was 3 or 4 minutes until anybody even brought it to FLIGHT's attention and another half hour before the reality of the situation started to set in.
The incident occurred with about an hour remaining in Krantz's white team shift. He gets all the attention now, because he's genuinely a stone cold badass, but there were a lot of supermen working this thing. Lunney, and in particular Sy Lybergot (EECOM), deserve way more credit than they'll ever get. Sy should have a freaking statue somewhere in the grounds of JSC, AFAIC.
It's amazing to me that 1 hour into a crisis situation Krantz just up and announces, "alright, time to let black team deal with this," and hands off the whole thing to the next crew who just arrived. If I were in his position I think they'd have to drag me out of there in a straight jacket.
Those people give new meaning to Grace Under Pressure. The situation slowly evolves from "maybe it's an instrumentation failure," to "whatever you don don't fuck up the moon landing," to "Christ, those guys might really die up there," and there's never a change in their tone or demeanor. It's all just problem solving to those guys. Quite remarkable.