But we idled back around to double-check on them just in case.. Accura Media Group LLC, 30 Dec. 2013. The cloak of black was made all the more intense by the surreal stillness. The flight engineer on duty during this flight was a personal friend to Repo and instantly recognized the face as that of his deceased friend. Charles Camichel 9/9/1899 (we assume this is the "C. Carmichael" on
I don't remember the take-off or the landing that day, but I vividly remember the meteorological conditions and the crash site. Five hours after the crash, the welcome sounds of voices and legs sloshing through water, labored breathing and flashlight beams probing the dark broke the silence. Silence. And before I had time to even let off the throttle or do anything else, I ran over those two people, who I knew were both dead. Pine and others want to do something nice for Bud, perhaps honor him with a special day, raise cash for Bud's taxes, groceries and medical bills. Bill Elliott had a much more eventful night. Later that afternoon or evening, Bill Elliott came back to the clubhouse where we were all waiting for him so he could let us know what he did and saw. How about we start with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?. A yellow flash. He knows exactly how he'd go about it. The hull slingshot forward as it dropped a couple of feet down into an open-water slough. The pilot Bob Loft and the flight engineer Don Repo were two of the 101 people who perished in the air crash. Im a tough Portuguese girl from Rhode Island.. For survivors, the crash has left physical and mental scars. Crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401. The strange tales of the ghostly airmen of Flight of 401 circulated in the airline community. The jet bounced once, then hit again. She had no first-aid kit. Her face burned from the jet fuel. The following is a list of survivors and victims of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401. The only thing she was looking forward to on arrival in Miami was going to bed. Two tours in Southeast Asia had hardened him. We were in Dade County, and my patrol zone was Broward County to the north., During his airboat training, senior wardens of the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission had told Leonhard, Never stop or slow an airboat down in rank grass because you may not be able to power out of it. Above (L to R): Martin Siminerio in hospital, two file photos from the Miami Herald of survivor Xiomara Casada at Palmetto General with her infant, Christina, in a Miami hospital. Web. An Eastern flight attendant posted this scan (below) from his L-1011 FA manual. It is now known that "Mrs. McAvoy" was Donna Smith, Thomas McAvoy's traveling companion. Officially, Eastern Air Lines denied anything was wrong with their aircraft or personnel. Thats what youre going to get when we get out of here. Abbey Lynn Greenwald 9/18/52
Sadly, she did not survive. if (theYear < 1900) But we knew our job was to rescue the survivors first. "That wasn't my first brush with death," he said. Rights and reuse information. The Infantinos were exhausted from celebrating Christmas with Rons parents in New York. The reports were given by experienced and trustworthy pilots and crew. "Having money ruined my life," he said. Survivors described a flash or spark that exploded through the cabin as the jet ripped apart. Around 4:30 a.m., Leonhard waded up to a willow heada thick tangle of weepy trees with brittle limbs draping into the water. Barbara Ann Saal
This quote, which was obviously a joke, was presented in the Ghost of Flight 401 as fact. The left wingtip hit first. While all this was very much in the public domain, reports circulated that aircraft engineers quietly removed any materials they had reused from the crash. One curious aspect of these sightings is that people always saw one or the other. The bent, white-haired man in the mirror has a bad heart and breathes from an oxygen machine, hasn't been frogging in a coon's age, and hasn't been in his airboat since, well, he can't remember. Nobody, not the pilots nor passengers, knew anything was amiss. Game warden Gray Leonhard in the 70s; Photography courtesy of Gray Leonhard. She found a section of the cabin with a stewardess still strapped into her seat-belt harness. Then he tells the story the best he can. Join our emailing list to keep up to date with the latest. The area I was about to go in was uncharted territory for me, Leonhard said. Ron Infantino woke up in a chill, heart pounding, breath erratic. As in other reports, the flight attendant selected Repos photo from a choice offered to her. Seventy-five miraculously survived. The next morning, as was my usual Saturday routine, I drove to the Sun Flying club timing it to arrive at approximately 11am. 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. The movie is fairly innacurate and over-dramitized. The actual crash was, in fact, true as reported; and there's never been any real doubt over what the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigators determined. The tall building behind the plane is Building 16 at MIA, the former headquarters of Eastern Air Lines. Boom. There were bodies that were naked, which we all figured occurred because they had been flung out of the protected environmental cocoon of the L1011 into 200 mph winds when the fuselage broke up. Lockheed L-1011 Inside the Hell Hole |
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. Eugene Schenker 6/24/30
Flight 401crash-landed into the Everglades at over 200 mph. Soon after, ghosts from Flight 401 began to haunt the land and other airplanes. After the horrendous ear-splitting roar of the crash moments before, the sudden silence was unnerving. "It survived that night, just like me. An interesting side show to the crash of Flight 401 was documented in the 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401, by John G. Fuller. Flight 401 may refer to: Iberia Airlines Flight 401, crashed on 5 May 1965. It looked like a piece of the wreckage, or something, had been propelled on a near horizontal trajectory, traveling just a foot or two above the waters surface, and rocketed into the willows with tremendous force., Bent at the waist, the two men waded into the hole, following a ragged debris trail of damaged vegetation. Loft told Stockstill to put the plane on autopilot while Repo went below to the avionics bay (called the "hell hole") to manually check the landing gear. So, being the thoughtful brother-in-law he was, unbeknownst to me he had collected some of the wreckage of Flight 401. The silence was broken only by the intermittent croaking of bullfrogs and the occasional rustle of tall reeds as an unseen creature passed through them. After graduation, he hitchhiked to Oregon and California to visit relatives, returning to Connecticut a couple of years later. Marquis waved his headlamp in circles, guiding the pilots to the crash. With determination born of her Portuguese grandparents work ethic and her work on a 160-acre dairy farm as a young girl growing up in Rhode Island, the former Girl Scout troop leader shouted, Im a stewardess. When I was learning to fly in the mid-1960s at Sun Line Helicopters, one of the fixed base operators (FBO) tied into the Miami-Dade Junior College aviation program at the Opa locka Airport, I worked as a line boy refueling aircraft and doing minor line maintenance. Ronald Jaye March 27, 1940
401 - Dan Delaney December 29, 2021, 4:20 pm. The flight, destined for Kyiv, Ukraine, took off on Jan. 8, 2020 from Tehran . Eastern Flight 401. He returned to Connecticut with his wife and infant son where he gained employment with Winchester Arms Company in New Haven, Conn. His career at Winchester included various fields of the sporting arms industry. document.write(theYear) Flamingo Magazine, This Recent University of Tampa Graduate Just Won the Florida Filmmaker Award. Unable to move and weak from severe loss of blood, his body hung suspended in the watery muck, still bent in the sitting position. theYear = now.getYear() Frightened, they called the flight deck, and the flight engineer came down to have a look for himself. Pilots of Eastern Airline Flight 401 Don Repo and Bob Loft. A jumbo jet crashed in the Everglades north of the Tamiami Trial, his sergeant said. Jose Carrasquillo 6/28/40
With the $250,000 legal settlement, Micale thought he had it made. According to the National Transportation Safety Board ( NTSB ), the main fuselage broke into four main sections and many other smaller pieces on impact. It's like it's a charm," she said. 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. Obviously, he was home trying to get some rest at noon on Saturday, but he eventually came out to the clubhouse late in the afternoon or early evening. However, we had one advantage that members of the general public didn't have - we had access to airplanes. We had a habit of informally gathering at the clubhouse on Friday and Saturday evenings to down a few beers and catch up on all the news that had any impact on us. Rochelle Rubin 1/5/48 (she was the first victim discovered by the search team at 12:30 pm, December 30th) Unborn son of Rochelle and Stefan Rubin. My guess is that the L1011 essentially did a flat or horizontal cartwheel and tore itself apart. A trio of newly minted Rolls-Royce turbofan jet engines made a rumble that could barely be heard by the 163 passengers and 13 crew members seated inside the spacious cabin and reconfigured cockpit. Ron and Fara Infantino, married for 20 days, were coming home from their honeymoon when Flight 401 crashed. Susana Luna 8/29/29
A pale glow lightened the sky above Miami more than 40 miles away. Judy Ellenberg 2/27/53
That alone adds credibility to their accounts. . If this was true, then perhaps they recycled more than just aircraft parts. Stewardess Beverly Raposa, then 25, noticed nothing unusual as the flight passed high over the Atlantic Ocean en route to Miami International Airport. Dead bodies hung, lay and floated everywhere I looked. No gunshots. She was whipped. Then a sudden jolt rattled the aircraft. The Ghost of Flight 401 (TV Movie 1978) - IMDb |
Eastern used the Bowmar/Calrod brand. Flight 401 Survivors, Years After the Crash and Memorial Efforts. I'm pretty sure that Tom Roche and Bob Crews were two of the "lucky" ones that got aboard, but I couldn't swear to it now. Newsroom Ready: Canadian officials, families honour Flight PS752 victims on third anniversary Grieving friends and relatives of victims killed during the downing of Flight PS752 called for justice and accountability from the Iranian regime as Canadians from coast to coast marked three years since the country's military shot the plane down. Then, on Saturday, December 29, a fleet of over 100 airboats carried survivors, their families and others to the crash site for a special memorial. If you like this programming, please become a member. But he and his helper had 30 pounds of legs. A Florida plane crash scene became even more disturbing when an alligator was spotted devouring the victim's body. I dont know this for sure, but I seem to remember he was the last survivor rescued.. Beverly Raposa stumbled out of the nightmarish apocalypse, hurt, disheveled and covered in clumps of dripping swamp grasses. He was an aviation business student at Miami-Dade Community College then, and used some of his money to start a commuter airline. This is a story about how a burnt out light bulb led to a major aviation disaster. Two others did not want to be reminded. He sold 13 in a month. He survived, barely, with his right arm nearly severed, his left knee broken and his chest crushed. Theyre not going to find us, an anxious passenger whispered. I mean, I was a single person with no family. It has a flat bottom and a high seat and a cobweb-draped engine and propeller. That section of the Everglades is a tangle of sawgrass, tree islands, canals and levees. Born in Arkansas, he grew up in South Florida when everybody seemed to be poor. Fuller wrote that the airline was apparently trying to cover this up. Rose Marie Cillis - Mark Paternoster May 15, 2021, 11:07 pm. Rob and Sarah Elder, 20 Aug. 2010. She had been turned down by Trans World Airlines for a job because she was a half inch under the 5-foot-2-inch minimum height required for all stewardesses. In a calm, soothing voice, she said, Now close your eyes and pretend you have a cup of coffee, hot chocolate or tea in your hands. Whenever someone told Fuller such a story, they frequently asked him not to use their real name, out of fear of reprisal from the company; thus, the book is full of untraceable sources and unverifiable claims. Not long after the crash, the ghosts of Loft and Repo were seen on more than twenty occasions by crew . I was tired and hit the sack as soon as I got home. The single-engine Cessna 152 was . Flight 401 soared above a primordial swampland filled with poisonous snakes and alligators crawling through razor-sharp sawgrass and open-water sloughs. 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." They go deep into the heart of the Florida Everglades to contact the victims' ghosts and find out what really happened that fateful night in 1972. Thanks to Jim Kalafus for the corrected names of Flight 401 victims drawn from Dade Country death certificate files and his continued research and participation in this effort. Many thanks to Sharon Kay Horvath, whose research helped me to find some of the burials. Folks from South Florida's sporting community, mostly hunters, fishers and airboaters, heard, many for the first time, about Bud. Source: Pope Lick Monster the Killer Goatman of Kentucky, Joyce Vincents Unsettling Death That Went Undiscovered for 3 Years, These Real Creepy Audio Recordings Will Give You Nightmares, The Case of Teresita BasaHow a Ghost Solved a Murder. Unborn son of Rochelle and Stefan Rubin
He has never taken pleasure in talking about what he saw after Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 went down and how he felt about it. For those who haven't seen the images: In her initial report from the crash site a large Ukrainian wheat field "dotted with purple flowers and Queen Anne's lace" the New York Times . Give or take a word, the announcement is remembered verbatim by virtually every survivor. It was quite possible that the landing gear was in the correct configuration. Isell Delgado 1/23/25
Sir, dont worry, he said. He likes to think about those days. I saw young couples broken up. She was shown photos of several of the flight staff and she picked out Don Repo. Today, she still has the small, Eastern Airlines-issued cream-colored suitcase she carried the night of the crash. Flight 401 Normal - Faulty Auto Pilot |
He'd stay calm, look at the stars for direction, think things through, then crank up the airboat engine and find his way back to the Tamiami Trail. Almost 40 years ago, Eastern Airlines flight 401 crashed. We've been married going on 18 years now." Copyright 2017 by the author and reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida. The old airboat, the airboat in which he carried injured passengers, waits on a rusty trailer with flat tires. The Ghost of Flight 401 was a book of nearly pure fiction, as was the TV movie that followed it. On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing over 100 souls. Worse, none of them noticed that the jet had been steadily losing altitude. 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. Please review this photograph closely. You can see the brand name on the oven instruction plate. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. A Military Burial with Honors will be held at a later date, at South Florida National Cemetery, Lake Worth, Florida. Rosemary Mancuso 10/31/49
Christina was the youngest survivor of the accident. "I thought I would fall apart," she told a newspaper in 1975. Lourdes Albert 2/20/50
The problem had consumed all their mental energy. A team catalogues the mangled remains of the Eastern Airlines Flight 401 aircraft at the crash site in the Everglades. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 2 |
He was out that night on his airboat, gigging frogs with a new friend, Ray Dickens. Patricia A. Ghyssels 3/31/45
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