flight 401 victims

He'd launch his airboat at the Miccosukee Indian Reservation on the Tamiami Trail and race north into the river of grass. Afterward, folks hope to take the old man into the Everglades, in his own airboat, if he wants. He invested in real estate, too. Further evidence that the whole ovens-got-salvaged story is untrue comes from claims that the ovens were made by Foster Refregerator company. We're having legs tonight. degree history and physical education. Aove, Eastern ship N318EA, the main aircraft haunted by the "Ghosts of Flight 401." One other witness has also come forward with a similar story that adds validity to the others simply because of who he was at the time. The wheels were down, locked in position for landing, but the pilot wasn't sure about the forward wheel under the plane's nose. Not one among the scores of EAL officers and employees interviewed expressed any belief whatsoever in the ghost story, and they resented what they felt was Fuller's twisting or inventing quotes. 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. I saw young couples broken up. He was one of those rare south Florida individuals who owned a ton of hunting rifles and lived for the deer hunting season so he could go out on his air boat and hunt scrawny deer in the Everglades. Sadly, she did not survive. Follow my voice!. Jerry stopped seeing the girl in Miami he had been dating, married a different woman a year later and quit his job at Gimbel's. Fuller's book was soon made into a popular TV movie, also called The Ghost of Flight 401, notable for having creeped people out for years. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 3 | She found a section of the cabin with a stewardess still strapped into her seat-belt harness. Salvatore Carfizzi 7/15/15 And now, no one was flying the plane. After we visually established where the crash site was located, we could see the initial ground contact point and the distribution of the wreckage quite clearly. Eastern used the Bowmar/Calrod brand. Eastern Airlines Flight #401 (L1011 N310EA) . Please email corrections, additions, photos or any other information you would like to have posted here. 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. That credo seems to be exemplified in every major airplane crash. Beverly Raposa stumbled out of the nightmarish apocalypse, hurt, disheveled and covered in clumps of dripping swamp grasses. Folks from South Florida's sporting community, mostly hunters, fishers and airboaters, heard, many for the first time, about Bud. Many thanks to Sharon Kay Horvath, whose research helped me to find some of the burials. Eastern Flight 401. Not long after, "ghosts" of Loft and Repo were seen on more than twenty occasions by crew members on other Eastern Tri-Stars, especially those planes which had been fitted with parts salvaged from the Flight 401 wreckage. Once you become stuck in the glades, you could be there for a long, long, time.. A friend once warned him: "One day you'll work a plane crash out there." It was quite possible that the landing gear was in the correct configuration. "I thought I would fall apart," she told a newspaper in 1975. Flight 401 - Flight Log | If you hear my voice, come toward me. Then zip, the light was out.". He had to make a detour of some 50 miles before he would arrive at the boat ramp on the north side of the Tamami Trail. Loft accidentally nudged the control yoke, perhaps with his knee, while turning around to speak to Repo, and the autopilot mode was one which followed whatever pitch the pilot set with the yoke. The froggers spent most of the night taking doctors and paramedics to the injured, and the injured to the levee where the helicopters were landing. She was shown photos of several of the flight staff and she picked out Don Repo. I wouldnt be a bit surprised if the speed hed been traveling was well over a hundred miles an hour., Leonhard added, The guy weighed around 160, but it still took eight of us carrying a stretcher filled with his dead weight to carry him out. However, the high point was the couple became engaged on the plane before takeoff. Charles Kuchenbrod 7/16/30 The majority of the witnesses are the most professional of professional people and simply not really the sort of people to invent the stories that they tell. She looked into the distance, saw the dim lights of Miami framed against a coal-black horizon and noticed how far away it was. He lost interest in his job and just wanted to be alone. This quote, which was obviously a joke, was presented in the Ghost of Flight 401 as fact. James Yandolino 3/7/52 NOTE - There is no official death certificates for "Mrs. McAvoy," which appeared in passenger lists released to the press at the time. At least he lives near his precious Everglades. She went into crew scheduling and suffers back pains still and hasn't been on an airplane in years. They got a warning light on the landing gear. The following is a list of survivors and victims of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401. One was Micale, who they found alone on a clump of swamp muck, drenched in swamp water and jet fuel. 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. In particular, an oven and the elevator (for the L-1011 had an elevator leading to a spacious downstairs galley) were salvaged from Flight 401 and installed on another L-1011 in the fleet, on which Repo usually appeared. Almost 40 years ago, Eastern Airlines flight 401 crashed. Robert Serling's 1980 book From the Captain to the Colonel tells the complete history of Eastern Airlines, from 1935 when it was headed by World War I ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, through the late 1980s when Apollo astronaut Colonel Frank Borman was at the helm (Borman, incidentally, was personally onsite at the Flight 401 crash, slogging through the mud and helping to rescue victims). After graduation, he hitchhiked to Oregon and California to visit relatives, returning to Connecticut a couple of years later. It was closing in on midnight on Dec. 29, 1972. Robert Albin Loft 3/17/17 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. The stories began four years later with the publication of John G. Fuller's 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401, which revealed that those four years had been filled with incidents of flight crew being startled by apparitions of Loft and Repo appearing on board other Eastern Air Lines planes. Surely, pilots and air crew would never make up such stories, would they? The explanation soon became clear: the apparitions were always on aircraft that contained equipment salvaged from Flight 401. Thomas Ponte 10/24/11 Pilots of Eastern Airline Flight 401 Don Repo and Bob Loft. Many of the survivors were also stripped of their clothes and this contributed to medical problems with all the bacteria in the Everglades water and the relatively cold temperatures that night. Two passing pilots saw it and called the airport. When she came to, she was still belted into her seat, tipped to one side, hanging six feet above the swamp. Raposa sensed a different tone in the engines. He probed it with his flashlight beam. It is now known that "Mrs. McAvoy" was Donna Smith, Thomas McAvoy's traveling companion. He wants to show them how to gig frogs. 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. Donadeo, an Eastern Airlines technical specialist on L-1011 aircraft, was returning to Miami that night from a trouble- shooting assignment in New York. He saw a man standing, shocked, in knee-deep water. Lucille Cilles 1/30/24 Bud spent his time arresting grizzled gator poachers and rough-cob deer thieves, cane-polers with too many bream on their stringers and feral teenage boys selling protected Indigo snakes to pet stores. 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. 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. Speeding across the 'glades in his airboat, Bud was the first rescuer on the scene. He was a devoted husband of sixty-two years to his first wife Martha (nee Regan) and beloved husband of his second wife Sue Johnson.Charlie was a loving son to the late Junius and Rachel Johnson, much loved father of the late Tracy Johnson and dear brother to the late Jeane Johnson Stanfield. The last thing Raposa remembered seeing before she was knocked out was a waterfall of colors. It was a heart-to- heart bond. Don Repo survived long enough to reach the hospital, but he also proved to be too badly injured. The flight crew of 401. Mom apparently worked closely with that flight attendant. Silvia Crespo 11/30/32 Le dimanche 26 janvier 2020, l'hlicoptre Sikorsky S-76 de Kobe Bryant s'crase prs de Calabasas, en Californie (tats-Unis).Les neuf occupants de l'appareil sont tus sur le coup. Work toward erecting a permanent memorial for Flight 401 at the Curtiss Mansion in Miami continues under the leadership of survivors Ron Infantino and Beverly Raposa. I told Hansel that we needed to check, before we got into the air, whether there were any flight restrictions over the crash site which seemed pretty logical to me. A team catalogues the mangled remains of the Eastern Airlines Flight 401 aircraft at the crash site in the Everglades. Obviously, this is a red flag waving at us vigorously that we should be sure to take this tale with several good grains of salt. Later, a Coast Guardsman told him theyd found a determined flight attendant standing atop a large section of cabin wreckage, leading a half dozen of the fortunate in song. Mama, heat up the frying pan. Most of what we talked about on the return to the airport was speculation on our part as to how the plane crashed, not why it crashed. A crawlspace beneath a cockpit is one thing, a galley oven is quite another. Exactly fifty years ago, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 mysteriously slammed into the Florida Everglades at over 200 miles per hour. Pilot Bob Loft, copilot Bert Stockstill, and flight engineer Don Repo were bringing the plane in to land at Miami International Airport. Some still feel the pain. THE CRASH OF FLIGHT 401 20 YEARS LATER SURVIVORS LIVE WITH PAIN, MEMORY, Author: ARNOLD MARKOWITZ Herald Staff Writer Copyright (c) 1992 The Miami Herald. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 4 | Back row from the left: Mercy Ruiz, Sue Tebbs, Adrienne Hamilton, Trudy Smith. 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. How about we start with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?. Flight 401 flew into the ground on Friday night, Dec. 29, 1972, at 13 seconds past 11:42 p.m. Officially, Eastern Air Lines denied anything was wrong with their aircraft or personnel. Pick up your airboat and meet me at the Twenty Mile Boat Ramp. , which was obviously a joke, was presented in the correct configuration 401 Don Repo bringing! Information you would like to have posted here airboat and meet me the! The Twenty Mile Boat Ramp Donna Smith, thomas McAvoy 's traveling companion to posted... How about we start with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? thomas Ponte 10/24/11 pilots Eastern. 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