", Another retired Eastern Airlines L-1011 captain which whom I have had contact responded the following way when asked about his experiences flying N318EA: "I flew that plane and never saw any ghosts or anything of that nature. "It's 100 degrees in the house, honey," Nancy says, joining him on the porch. The middle engine and tail section had broken away from the main fuselage, coming to a rest on their sides in a remote area far from the main crash site, which was located 18.7 miles northwest of Miami International Airport. It is personal and it has served over the intervening years to remind me of how precious and tenuous life can be. Although he was a passenger, he rode in the cockpit with pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer. That doesn't haunt me either . His book was later made into a TV movie. We're having legs tonight. The Ghost of Flight 401. A pale glow lightened the sky above Miami more than 40 miles away. This guy had been hurled from the plane like a human cannonball. Below: The Casado family tour the crash site. Fourteen survivors had various degrees of burns. About 490 feet (150m) from the wingtip's initial contact with the ground, the massive fuselage had begun to break up, scattering components from the underfloor galley, the cargo compartments, and the cabin interior. It didn't light. Tennessee's Music City combines country, bluegrass, rock, pop, Americana, gospel, classical, jazz, and bluesall in perfect harmonyto create one of the best places in the world to remember music's greatest performers, see today's top artists, and maybe discover the next big thing. There were also a bunch of vehicles and some helicopters on a nearby levee that was being used as the base of operations for the rescue and crash investigation. At approximately 2340R 29 December 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401, a Lockheed 1011, with 178 persons on board, crashed in the Everglades 18 miles west of Miami International Airport. Because of the magnitude of the rescue operation and of the medical emergency caused the study resulted in a . Aside from the initial trouble finding the crash site in the dark, most of his comments that I remember related to the passengers and crew that had been killed in the crash. Flight 401 flew into the ground on Friday night, Dec. 29, 1972, at 13 seconds past 11:42 p.m. [15][18] The reported hauntings were said to be seen only on the planes that used the spare parts. Startled, and now fully awake, he wondered, Whats going on here? A former crew chief on a B-52 in Vietnam, he had a keener sense than most passengers about a plane in trouble. In the end, it appears that the source of the stories was an article in an issue of the Flight Safety Foundation. The night was a balmy 72 degrees, the mosquitoes surprisingly sparse. Branches had been recently snapped off all the way around the opening, all pointing inward. Rodas, meanwhile, is "badly burned" as well, the source says. He knows exactly how he'd go about it. All 110 people on board died. The pilot Bob Loft and the flight engineer Don Repo were two of the 101 people who perished in the air crash. Eugene Schenker 6/24/30
"He was naked. Based on Fuller's book, it emphasized the ghost sightings. Repo, Donald Louis |
After dark he moonlighted as a commercial frogger. The NTSB classified the injuries of one nonrevenue passenger and one other passenger as nonfatal, as their deaths occurred more than seven days after the accident. At 11:32, they aborted the landing, climbed to 2,000 feet and swung west over the Everglades to work out the problem. That was a miracle that is probably attributable to three factors: (1) the crash site was a soft, wet swamp; (2) there was no significant post-crash fire; and (3) the force of disintegration was directed horizontally and not vertically, flinging many survivors out into the swamp instead of subjecting them to fatal blunt force trauma which is characteristic of most airplane crashes. Then the commuter airline folded. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. The time was 9:20 p.m. He seemed deeply saddened by that fact. [16], While Eastern Air Lines publicly denied their planes were haunted, they reportedly removed all the salvaged parts from their L-1011 fleet. Robert Loft, 55; First Officer Albert Stockstill, 39, and Second Officer Donald Repo, 51, all of Miami-Dade. James Yandolino 3/7/52
Photo credit: Don Boyd of Sun Bird Photos. My guess is that the L1011 essentially did a flat or horizontal cartwheel and tore itself apart. Donadeo said he is not troubled by survivor guilt, a common after-effect of tragedies. All three pilots, two of 10 flight attendants, and 96 of 163 passengers died, while 75 passengers and crew survived. Flight 401 was a short-haul flight to Miami. "Hey, what's happening here?" MIAMI - Thursday marks 50 years since Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades. [5]:3, Loft, who was working the radio during this leg of the flight, told the tower that they would discontinue their approach to their airport and requested to enter a holding pattern. His last complete thought before losing consciousness was, This is going to be one hell of a rough landing., Beverly Raposa with her Eastern Airlines stewardess class in the 60s; Photography courtesy Ron Infantino. Leonhard killed the engine so that they could listen for the calls of survivors. Braulio Corretjer 1/5/28
Huge gouts of mud and aquatic vegetation shot high into the air as 185 tons of screeching metal ripped into the muck and grass. "I couldn't understand why I lived and they didn't. Combined with numerous anonymous witnesses and countless tales, the rumors spread throughout the aviation community. The flight had 163 passengers and 13 crew members. The Ghosts of Eastern Flight 401. He has fallen backwards and his arms are spread apart. Raposa, Beverly |
But Infantino couldnt follow the voice. Back in the day, when he spent so much time in the wilderness, only the airplanes overhead reminded him of civilization. in Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace Engineering, or related subject area She was whipped. Ethel L. Jackson 3/8/08
He put his arm around her, and they began slogging through knee-deep muck and water. Anne Ponte 1/7/16
He wants to show them how to gig frogs. During its flight from New York to Miami, an aircraft operating Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades after the cockpit became so distracted by a burnt-out landing gear indicator light, they neglected to notice the autopilot had disengaged, and that the plane was slowly losing altitude. "I consider the survivors 75 miracles. Leonhard put the car in park, cut the motor and stepped out. Rowdy fans of Notre Dame and University of Nebraska, scheduled to play on New Year's Day at the Orange Bowl, were poised to take over the town. At 11:32 p.m., Capt. He saw a man standing, shocked, in knee-deep water. From this point on, the breakup of the fuselage became more extensive, scattering metal fragments, cabin fittings, and passenger seats widely. Yetta Cohn 3/17/16
The death toll at the time was the highest of any one-plane accident in U.S. civil aviation history. Donadeo, an Eastern Airlines technical specialist on L-1011 aircraft, was returning to Miami that night from a trouble- shooting assignment in New York. Those words guided Leonhard as his 14-foot patrol airboat bulldozed through dense walls of water-anchored grass. Theyll find us eventually., Raposa had the survivors scoot together, sitting back to back so they could stay warm. A light in the Sky Some of those he saved were there, including flight attendants Mercy Ruiz and Sue Tebbs, as well as Beverly Raposa, the flight attendant who rallied passengers to safety after the crash. He was in the fetal position, head on his knees, hands covering his face, leaning against the trunk of a willow. Incongruously, not far from the roofless fuselage center section with the inner portion of the starboard wing still attached, lay a large, undamaged and fully inflated rubber dinghy, one of a number carried on the TriStar in the event of an emergency water landing. I checked my log book entry for Dec. 30, 1972, hoping it would shed some light on who else was aboard, but all it says is, "Day VFR EAL L-1011 crash site EA 401." Wrong. As the plane descended on its final landing approach to Miami International Airport, a cheerful voice boomed over the cabins loudspeaker address system: Welcome to sunny Miami, the captain announced. I was a kid, 21 years old. Jorge Gonzalez 1/16/38
View history. Jose Garcia 6/4/47
Like a lot of other aspiring commercial pilots, I had had a checkered aviation career, having worked, among other things, as the full-time chief pilot of a regional oil company while attending college. She had nothing. The next morning, as was my usual Saturday routine, I drove to the Sun Flying club timing it to arrive at approximately 11am. A lot of the people I saw were naked. I have lost contact with Bill Elliott. Speculation at the club was rampant which is to be expected from a bunch of pilots. I do recall that some gremlins were on it though and they kept messing up my landing!!!!". They didn't keep score, but Marquis knows they saved a lot of people's lives that night. Eight passengers became infected; doctors used hyperbaric chambers to treat the infections. Chapter II - OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (AVIATION PROCEEDINGS) Subchapter A - ECONOMIC REGULATIONS. The Ghost of Flight 401 was based on the tragic Eastern Air Lines airplane crash in December 1972, and the alleged supernatural events which followed; it was eventually turned into a popular 1978 made-for-television movie. They rushed to rescue survivors. [23], According to Robert J. Serling's 1980 book From the Captain to the Colonel: An Informal History of Eastern Airlines, the claim that wreckage from Flight 401 was installed and later removed from other Eastern aircraft was false, and no Eastern employees had ever claimed to have seen or believed in the alleged ghost sightings. Bud waved his light until the helicopter took notice. We exited the area and returned to Opa locka Airport, but our conversations were subdued. Trudy Smith didn't return to flying. In short, it was a great place to eat (we used to have outstanding club Bar-B-Q, talk airplanes, perform minor maintenance and fly planes. An account of the paranormal happenings even appeared in a 1974 issue of the US Flight Safety Foundation newsletter. One hundred and three lives were lost. Richard Childs 5/21/52
If one more time he could harvest a mess of frog legs in the Everglades. the passenger manifest)
He immediately drove to Eastern's Miami offices and decided to charter a helicopter to the crash site, as the swampy terrain made rescue difficult, and Eastern Airlines had not heard any news of progress in rescue efforts. The experienced flight crew was distracted when the landing gear light failed to come on, which they believed was caused by a blown bulb. [6], The flight was commanded by Captain Robert Albin (Bob) Loft, age 55, a veteran pilot ranked 50th in seniority at Eastern Air Lines. (The largest L1011 operators then at MIA were Eastern Airlines and Delta Airlines, but I don't recall seeing any airline markings when the L1011 was overhead.) Now take a sip. Ernest F. Bloodgood 4/1/16
"Then I saw this great big fireball and the whole 'glades lit up. Bud helped the man into the airboat and poured him coffee from the thermos. With almost twice the area of Rhode Island, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States has some of the most formidable terrain on Earth. Once the crisis was over, respiratory therapist Susan Mefford was assigned to Infantino. A Web forum, Southern Airboat, which attracts thousands of worldwide participants, plans to take care of the repairs. The other house is gone; his still requires repairs. It was approximately 15 to 20 miles west-southwest of the Opa locka Airport and it was pretty difficult to find at first. A similar situation appeared in the Thai movie Dark Flight, directed by Kongkiat Khomsiri, produced in 2012. A mass of interesting testimony was produced as a result. He shut down the engine again to listen. Bud no longer worked as a game warden - his day job was laying carpet. He probed it with his flashlight beam. [22] Loft's widow and children did sue Fuller, for infringement of Loft's right of publicity, for invasion of privacy, and for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal. This was one of those moments when there arent enough words in the dictionary to describe the devastation. |
Raposa was struggling for ideas to keep her group occupied. They were not only reported by people who had known Loft and Repo, but the ghosts were also subsequently identified from photographs by people who had not known Loft and Repo. Seventy-five miraculously survived. Warren Terry 2/16/34
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