Now for the big decisions - who gets to ride with us? Flight 401 Crash Site Hauntings |. His foot pressed lightly against the accelerator pedal as he inched down the south levee on the L-28 canal with his headlights off. Ernest F. Bloodgood 4/1/16 Lets sing Christmas carols, Raposa replied. NTSB Crash Report (Flight 401) | With his left, he held onto the boat and walked beside it to the levee. [5]:4 In the next 70 seconds, the airplane lost only 250ft (76m), but this was enough to trigger the altitude warning C-chord chime located under the engineer's workstation. The flight was under the command of Captain Robert Loft, 55, a veteran Eastern Airline plot. Wrong. Sharon Transue was a replacement crew member out of reserve, didn't feel as much a . The largest recognizable pieces of wreckage were the cockpit section and the center engine intake and attached fuselage section. The hours passed, and still no rescuers had arrived. His required surgery. James Hall, Flight Operations and Safety, Miami office, had the task of notifying all the families of the crash victims. An aerial view of the crash site; a swath of the Everglades; Photography courtesy Ron Infantino. The aircraft was completely demolished, with wreckage, bodies, and survivors strewn over a wide area. Tuesday. Two tours in Southeast Asia had hardened him. On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing over 100 souls. Because of the magnitude of the rescue operation and of the medical emergency caused the study resulted in a . Beverly Raposa doesn't mind flying. He did well for a while -- had a big house in the Country Club of Miami and drove a Lincoln. The time was 9:20 p.m. I wish I had that kind of money today instead of 20 years ago. Beverly Raposa switched seats from her regular position in the galley for a flight from New York to Miami. Caridad Fermina Hernandez 10/11/32 Renee Joaquin Albert 8/3/36 Sometimes, back when there were no cell phones or GPS electronics to help navigate, he'd get lost at night. The warden noted nothing of interest. Grand Canyon Disaster + . He saw a man standing, shocked, in knee-deep water. He put his arm around her, and they began slogging through knee-deep muck and water. Last edited on 22 February 2023, at 02:18, intentional infliction of emotional distress, "Airliner carrying 167 crashes in Everglades", "Giant jetliner goes down in 'gator infested swamp", "Eastern Airlines, Inc. L-1011, N310EA, Miami, Florida, December 29, 1972", "Robert "Bud" Marquis's Obituary on San Francisco Chronicle", "PART TWO: THE CRASH "It felt like a wild rollercoaster ride", "A Lesson on the Importance of Crew Resource Management", "Lessons Learnt from the Crash of Eastern 401", Eastern Flight 401 The Story of the Crash, The Crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401-Epilogue, ASN Aircraft accident Lockheed L-1011-385-1 TriStar 1 N310EA Everglades, FL, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401&oldid=1140849286, This page was last edited on 22 February 2023, at 02:18. Some survivors recovered and adjusted better than others. In 1985, his years as a manual laborer caught up with him. Survivors described a flash or spark that exploded through the cabin as the jet ripped apart. | [6]:108 The most common injuries were fractures of ribs, spines, pelvises, and lower extremities. Several survivors tracked him down to thank him personally. Julia Lustig 5/30/25 In unison, we looked up to see the silhouette of a Lockheed L1011 flying westbound at an altitude of about 2,000 feet. Flight 401 - First Response | '," she says now. Hansel owned a single engine Piper Comanche 250, registered as N7510P, that held four people, including the pilot. Hey!" The plane, a new "Whisperliner," could transport 229 passengers. Thirty minutes later, Leonhard and his passengers suddenly burst out of a thick patch of 12-foot-high sawgrass. In fact, she told my mother that she cringed in fear every time she drove down Le Jeune Road (the eastern boundary of Miami International Airport) just because of all the jet noise when planes were landing and taking off. It's truly amazing how the mind works for, at the time, I had no idea of the significance of what I saw that night nor did I intend to store it away in my memory banks. Robert A. Loft, then 55 years old, with 30 years experience and 29,700 flight hours under his belt, attempted to lower the landing gear. They turned on the autopilot. For his efforts, he received the Humanitarian Award from the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation and the "Alumitech Airboat Hero Award", from the American Airboat Search and Rescue Association. employees and their immediate families of the Promoter and its related bodies corporate and registered travel companions of employees of the Promoter and its related bodies corporate. Jesus Lorenzo 4/26/37 Rons eyes blinked open upon hearing the engines roar to full power. She had no first-aid kit. That credo seems to be exemplified in every major airplane crash. The altimeter showed a decrease in altitude, but none of the crew noticed. Loft, Robert Albin | He had logged 280 hours in the L-1011. How about we start with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?. He was an aviation business student at Miami-Dade Community College then, and used some of his money to start a commuter airline. All three pilots, two of 10 flight attendants, and 96 of 163 passengers died, while 75 passengers and crew survived. The cruel facts of this disaster only reinforced my observation that you won't die unless it's your time to die. [14], During the following months and years, stories began circulating that employees of Eastern Air Lines, and numerous passengers, had reported sightings of the dead crew members, captain Robert Loft and second officer (flight engineer) Donald Repo, sitting aboard other L-1011s (including, in particular, N318EA). There were four men in the cockpit, all preoccupied with the light and landing gear. Give or take a word, the announcement is remembered verbatim by virtually every survivor. "You didn't have nothing to worry about," he'd tell her, finding a seat on the porch, from where he could hear the barred owls and their singular "who-cooks-for-you" calls, exciting and mournful at once. The left wingtip hit first. They have two sons and live in Dade City now, near Tampa. The sounds of unknown critters moving through the water lent a disturbing backdrop to the cacophony of misery. His book was later adapted into a made-for-tv movie starring William Shatner as an NTSB investigator. Airline employees began spreading stories of apparitions to the point where Eastern management warned employees that they could face dismissal if caught, and any log book entries about such matters would be removed. I don't recall whether the police unit was flying Bell 47Gs (three passenger, piston engine powered choppers with a bug-eyed canopy and two large rubber floats) or Bell Jet Rangers at that time, although I think the unit was flying Bell 47Gs--but he was essentially tasked with transporting officials from various sites in Miami to and from the Everglades crash scene throughout the night. Of five survivors The Herald located this week, three talked freely about Flight 401. If he saw legs kicking, he turned the seat over. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, crashed on 29 December 1972. Off I went to check with the FAA Flight Service Station. You don't want to be in the water with me.". There were 176 people aboard the state-of-the-art Lockheed L-1011, which was nicknamed the. Sure enough, I recall that the initial restricted area was posted in a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) and set out a no-fly zone that had a one mile radius from the crash site up to 2,000 feet above mean sea level. Two days later, Lilly Infantino was found trapped beneath one of the wings. [5]:6[a], The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation discovered that the autopilot had been inadvertently switched from altitude hold to control wheel steering (CWS) mode in pitch. Some still feel the pain. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a Lockheed L-1011-1 Tristar jet that crashed into the Florida Everglades at 11:42 pm December 29, 1972, causing 101 fatalities. Frank Borman And Flight 401 #2505745 BY NIKV69 - Fri Feb 20, 2004 11:17 am Being a child from an Eastern Air Lines family I am shocked that my father never told me that Frank Borman who at the time was a new VP of EAL rushed to the scene of the crash of flight 401 in the Everglades in December of 72'. She found a section of the cabin with a stewardess still strapped into her seat-belt harness. if (theYear < 1900) Kenneth Michael Mazonne 3/27/44 Rochelle Rubin 1/5/48 (she was the first victim discovered by the search team Abbey Lynn Greenwald 9/18/52 Of the cockpit crew, only flight engineer Repo survived the initial crash, along with technical officer Donadeo, who was down in the nose electronics bay with Repo at the moment of impact. The disintegration of the aircraft that followed scattered wreckage over an area 1,600ft (500m) long and 330ft (100m) wide in a southwesterly direction. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a scheduled flight from New York JFK to Miami.Shortly before midnight on December 29, 1972, the Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar crashed into the Florida Everglades, causing 101 total fatalities. Photo credit: Don Boyd of Sun Bird Photos. Barry L. Mancuso 10/19/44 Now it was her turn. Fourteen survivors had various degrees of burns. 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 [6]:110, Investigation into the aircraft's autopilot showed that the force required to switch to CWS mode was different between the A and B channels (15 and 20lbf or 65 and 90N, respectively). The plane descended out of the sky as pilots were distracted over a landing gear warning light. Susan Deutsch 10/21/42 As you may know, the mansion is an historic landmark in Miami, located just north of the airport it served as the location of the NTSB hearings into the crash. Develop, execute, and document the system verification plan for flight and representative hardware at the system level and validate the as-built system prior to launch. Bill, ironically, as well as being the proud owner of a pristine Cessna 180 was one of the helicopter pilots for the Metro-Dade police department. I didn't tell him that it felt really strange realizing that so much of the plane was still out in the glades. Shock had taken over. Following the crash, Raposa was praised for her valor. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 4 | of 401 King Street, London, W6 9NJ, United Kingdom (+612 9691 0176). That was an unsurvivable crash, but we made it out," she said. The Nordskog were installed mostly on the L1011-500 series. Not shown, Sharon Transue (she was taking the photo). Infantino also won a large legal settlement and lost everything. Bill and I left for our respective homes after securing the clubhouse. The jet actually began losing altitude, so gradually that no one noticed until the very end. Riding with him were two Federal Aviation Administration officials. Below Left - In red, stewardess Beverly Raposa at the memorial. "I could get it running," he says, fighting for breath. Donadeo, an Eastern Airlines technical specialist on L-1011 aircraft, was returning to Miami that night from a trouble- shooting assignment in New York. Flight 401 departed JFK Airport in New York on Friday, December 29, 1972, at 21:20, with 163 passengers and 13 crew members on board. His fishing and hunting skills helped put supper on the family table. He wanted me to be the pilot (no objection from me) and he would occupy the co-pilot's seat. One day, late in 1973, I got a phone call from James telling me to come over to his house; he had something for me. Bud waved the helicopter toward a nearby levee. Passenger List: TWA Flight 800. "Remember what the doctor said," Nancy chimes in. Solomon Fisher 7/18/11 I don't recall any large scorched patches of saw grass, but I remember a few small burned areas. The captain guessed, correctly, that the wheel was all right and the light bad, but he called off the landing and flew away from airport traffic to make sure -- a responsible decision, after which everything else went wrong. "When I tried to prop him up it felt like every bone in his body was broken.". Though Leonhard was only a rookie, the sight of death was not unfamiliar to him. He'd launch his airboat at the Miccosukee Indian Reservation on the Tamiami Trail and race north into the river of grass. He hoped the circling delay would give them time to fix the problem. Angelo was a friend to all who know him, generous with his time to anyone who needed him and a devoted husband and father. Then the commuter airline folded. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. It was closing in on midnight on Dec. 29, 1972. He had scarcely recovered from a bad auto accident when 401 crashed. The government considered him totally disabled. Barbara Ann Saal I mean, I was a single person with no family. [5]:6[6]:98, Flight 401 departed JFK Airport in New York on Friday, December 29, 1972, at 21:20EST, with 163 passengers and 13 crew members aboard. I don't remember the take-off or the landing that day, but I vividly remember the meteorological conditions and the crash site. They didn't find each other until morning. On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines flight 401 left New York's JFK airport and crashed on its approach to Miami, killing 101 of the 176 people on board. "He's one of us," says John Canti, a firefighter, paramedic and outdoorsman. Raposa smiled cheerfully while she collected empty drink cups and dishes from the passengers. Ann Connell, Barry Connell, Angelo Donadeo, Patricia R Georgia, Adrianne Ann Hamilton, Jennifer Larsen, Thomas Mulcahy, Mercedes V Ruiz, Beverly Jean Raposa, Trudy J Smith, Sue F. Tibbs, Sharon R Transue, Dorothy M Warnock. The National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation gave Marquis a humanitarian award for being the first to respond to the crash, and in a touching tribute, members of The Southern Airboat association presented Marquis with a completely rebuilt airboat - the same one he had used to rescue crash victims in 1972.. "I think it's nice, but I don't think I really deserve a lot of hullabaloo over this," Marquis, 78, of Homestead, said of the award. Fara Infantino 12/7/46 Albert J. Stockstill 6/9/33 The following conversation was recovered from the flight voice recorder later: Less than 10 seconds after this exchange, the jetliner crashed: The location was west-northwest of Miami, 18.7mi (30.1km) from the end of runway 9L. His book was later made into a TV movie. Three of the four cockpit crew members, two of the 10 flight attendants, and 96 of the 163 passengers were killed; 75 people survived. The final NTSB report cited the cause of the crash as pilot error, specifically: "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. He saw openings in the sawgrass created by sliding chunks of broken airplane. She dug down into the black muck, cupped a double handful to her face and smeared it all over the affected areas. Also notable were the Eastern Airlines two-tone blue and white colors on the larger pieces of wreckage. Hansel Meighen died on April 15, 1999, and is buried in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Frank Borman, a former NASA astronaut and Eastern's senior vice president of operations, was awoken at home by a telephone call explaining of a probable crash. [12][13] The training is designed to make problem solving in a cockpit much more efficient, thus causing less distraction for the crew. Although there is no factual evidence to support the claim, legend has it that after the crash investigation, surviving avionics and galley equipment was salvaged from the crash site, returned to the manufacturers and overhauled to help relieve equipment shortages on Lockheed's growing production line. [5]:4 The engineer (Repo) had gone below, and no indication was heard of the pilots' voices recorded on the CVR that they heard the chime. Around 4:30 a.m., Leonhard waded up to a willow heada thick tangle of weepy trees with brittle limbs draping into the water. From his vantage point atop the levee, Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission Officer Gray Leonhard, then 24 years old, had a commanding view across the vast darkened marsh. It was more accurately a "tie-down"club; the members owned their aircraft and joined the club to be able to tie-down their aircraft at reasonable costs and have access to a ramp area where they could perform routine maintenance on their planes. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 left New York's JFK airport, bound for Miami International Airport, on December 29, 1972. In its first three hours aloft, Flight 401 had been uneventful. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 7 | Effectively, we turned the clubhouse into the European equivalent of a weekend pub. 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. They headed for the flash. "I couldn't understand why I lived and they didn't. She was whipped. His flight crew included First Officer Albert John "Bert" Stockstill, 39, who had 5,800 hours of flying experience (with 306 of them in the L-1011), and Flight Engineer Donald Louis "Don" Repo, 51, who had 15,700 hours of flying experience, with 53 of them in the L-1011. 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