Miguel Junco, being carried into a hospital by an attendant. That was the last transmission before the left wing sliced into the Everglades at 225 mph. The plane was dropping from the sky at a rate of 200 feet each minute. Source: FAA. They were all the pieces that had been salvaged from Flight 401, including the oven and elevator, but many other pieces as well. It turned out to be anything other than a routine Saturday! She dug down into the black muck, cupped a double handful to her face and smeared it all over the affected areas. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 traveled from New York to Miami. Isell Delgado 1/23/25 As I sit writing this 34 years later in December 2006, I can still visualize the events of that night just as if they had occurred yesterday. Hansel owned a single engine Piper Comanche 250, registered as N7510P, that held four people, including the pilot. The unintentional jar apparently caused the planes nose to tilt down a few degrees. That's why Hansel wanted me to fly; it would be my license that got revoked if we got caught, not his! 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. Julia Lustig 5/30/25 The flight attendant, Mercy Ruiz, was badly injured, with a broken pelvis and a severe laceration on her forehead. That alone adds credibility to their accounts. A graveside service will take place on Friday, December 4, at 10:30 AM. From an aviation perspective, this was no small feat. Two passing pilots saw it and called the airport. Lloyd Irving Bearman 1/16/23 Raposa was struggling for ideas to keep her group occupied. The oven choices for airlines were either Nordskog or the Bowmar/Calrod brand. So, being the thoughtful brother-in-law he was, unbeknownst to me he had collected some of the wreckage of Flight 401. "That wasn't my first brush with death," he said. 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. That was a godsend because I got to meet and befriend many of the club members, most of whom were successful small business owners enjoying the fruits of their labor by owning and operating private aircraft (something that is almost cost prohibitive in today's aviation, regulatory and business environments). The crash of Flight 401 highlighted a number of deficiencies in flight safety that, I'm happy to say, were soon implemented. Diane Carol Greenblatt 5/5/52 Flight 401 - First Response | What made it so hard was trying to manhandle him up and over the broken willows. ValuJet 592 went down in May 1996, killing all 110 on board. Web. 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. "I've tried to throw [the suitcase] away many times, but something always holds me back. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. Fuller's claims that Eastern executives tried to bully their employees into silence about the ghosts led them to nearly file suit against the publisher, but Borman nixed the plan, rightly feeling that doing so would give the book even more publicity. Eastern's L-1011's came equipped with six Bowmar ovens (Lockheed Part Number 671878-115). He saw a man, sitting in the water with a neck injury, trying to remain upright. Funny how people scream for God at a time like that. 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. He'd get that look. Susan Deutsch 10/21/42 Flight 401 Survivors, Years After the Crash and Memorial Efforts. Still, $50,000 will have to be raised in order to erect the memorial. My direct and indirect contact with Eastern Flight 401 didn't end on December 30, 1972. Ronald Jaye March 27, 1940 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. He was mentioned in a book, The Crash of Flight 401, later made into a B-movie, and helped a Hollywood writer with the awful Ghosts of Flight 401, about commercial jets haunted by the dead pilots. 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. The rescuers are picking people up from the nose section of the plane first. Ron Infantino woke up in a chill, heart pounding, breath erratic. 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. In a weak voice, one of them asked, What about the alligators?, Raposa didnt hesitate: We made such a loud noise when we hit. Surprisingly, he found that there were large pieces of wreckage still out in the glades. Forgotten about him, actually. A pale glow lightened the sky above Miami more than 40 miles away. Mr. Elder later became an Editor at the San Jose Mercury News. Jonathan Adam Kaminer 8/22/70 That subsides. He wants to show them how to gig frogs. It's a swamp, a flat swamp. Leonhard happened to be looking southeast across the glades. Then an alarm chimed, signaling a 250-foot drop. The wreckage of Eastern Air Lines flight 401 lies in the Florida Everglades after the crash. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was on its final approach into Miami shortly before midnight 50 years ago this month when a single light bulb on the aircraft's instrument panel failed to illuminate . On Dec. 29, 1972, Eastern Flight 401 from New York to Miami took off from . The 52-year-old flight engineer was one of 101 people who'd died Dec. 29, 1972 when Eastern Flight 401, packed with holiday travelers, slammed into the Everglades . 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. Eventually, the investigations were concluded and most, but not all, of the wreckage was removed or salvaged from the Everglades. Wreckage site of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401. During a rare moment of calm after the rescue helicopter had departed for Miami, he heard the faint tune of a Christmas carol. As I recall that December night, it was a relatively cool evening for south Florida with a moonless night sky. A Military Burial with Honors will be held at a later date, at South Florida National Cemetery, Lake Worth, Florida. (none / Historical Museum of Southern Fl . The company folded in 1991 and is perhaps still better known for some of the more compelling and credible paranormal encounters to date. Jose Carrasquillo 6/28/40 He was trapped beneath the water. By the time I got to the clubhouse, there must have been 10 to 15 members milling about, all discussing the crash. 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. Meanwhile, 1,100 miles to the north, an Eastern Airlines jumbo jet lifted off in bitter cold weather from New Yorks John F. Kennedy International Airport. "Nobody paid him to go out there and try to rescue people," says Ken Pine, who recently fixed Bud's roof. Introducing the Keys Quirkiest Resident. Dunning, B. Flight 401 soared above a primordial swampland filled with poisonous snakes and alligators crawling through razor-sharp sawgrass and open-water sloughs. Someone had seen his frogging light. . 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. Two minutes later, Flight 401 called the air traffic control tower. I vaguely remember that we ended up taking a total of five people on that flight. Lourdes Albert 2/20/50 Bernard A. Goldfuss 11/2/22 1972 was drawing to a close when a routine flight from JFK, New York to Miami departed at 9:20 p.m. with 30-year veteran pilot Captain Bob Loft at the controls. Huge gouts of mud and aquatic vegetation shot high into the air as 185 tons of screeching metal ripped into the muck and grass. Flight 401 Crash Site Hauntings |. Angelo was a friend to all who know him, generous with his time to anyone who needed him and a devoted husband and father. Pedro Garcia 2/10/26 Operated by a Lockheed L-1011-385-1 TriStar (N310EA), the aircraft crashed into the Florida Everglades on a nighttime approach to Miami International Airport (MIA) on December 29, 1972. ExpandAutoplay. Surprise turned to horror when Repo disappeared before the pilots eyes. Mysterious Universe "I couldn't understand why I lived and they didn't. Adelaide Geneve Bearman 9/21/22 The ultimate "yes sir, no sir" man, Bud shuffles reluctantly onto the porch, blinking furiously in the sunlight, wondering what's up. Bob Loft appeared before the Vice President of Eastern Air Lines in First Class. 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. The underside of the L1011 was reflecting the ground lighting from the airport and the surrounding city which made it easy to identify the aircraft type although we couldn't identify the airline. A Florida plane crash scene became even more disturbing when an alligator was spotted devouring the victim's body. A jet airliner is not something that immediately comes to mind: except to those who know aboutEastern Air Lines flight 401. 21 Mar 2017. About a year after the crash of Flight 401, she told me that one of the flight attendants who had survived the crash had come back to work at Eastern, but was assigned to the executive secretarial pool while she recovered from her physical injuries and tried to cope with her mental anguish. Caridad Fermina Hernandez 10/11/32 I had first, second and third-degree burns all over my body. To all who shivered at night in fear of this creepy story, it seemed that it must have been true as reported. It's time to change that, say survivors and families of the victims, who hope to raise $15,000 for a granite block containing the names of those who died. Some would rather not remember. Frequent Business Traveler. Leonhard put the car in park, cut the motor and stepped out. Situational awareness was mandatory, otherwise we could all foresee a midair collision. It looked like someone had poured gasoline on a campfire, and poof, up it went. Curiously, Leonhard never heard the impact. Of the 176 passengers and crew members aboard Flight 401, 77 survived the initial crash. The plane crashed into the swamp; fortunately, it was a relatively gentle angle into a soft surface, and that's what allowed so many to survive. Dennis Gordon 12/9/32 That was the first time I had heard of the crash. This witness, a female passenger, described an ashen looking person sitting in one of the seats. No gunshots. Beverly Raposa doesn't mind flying. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew blew the roof of the house across the street through his front windows. Some may have tried to turn this actual human tragedy into a fictional ghost story, but it was the efforts of the real people involved who used it to extinguish a few real ghosts in the form of safety flaws, to reduce the chances of the same type of accident happening again. The bronze plaques are being donated as well as the granite base. Like so many such cases, its exploitation of a tragedy for financial gain and publicity was disrespectful to both the victims and the survivors. 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. Silence. Anyway, the statute of limitations has long since passed. Official Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 - History, Photos, Survivors and Tribute. "He swore that Frank Borman had paid him to come to Miami and perform an exorcism on #318. This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic. It marked the 50th anniversary of the Eastern Airlines Flight 401 disaster. I was amazed at the size of some of the pieces of wreckage he brought home on the air boat. He'd see the lights and hear the roar as the jets climbed into the black night over the swamp or descended toward Miami International Airport. ", This pilot added, however, that he "flew 318 several times in the late 80s and never saw any unnatural apparitions - some weird looking people, but no ghosts. Im sure they all ran away. She spit the words out quickly, doing her best to sound convincing. Witnesses include pilots, various other members of Eastern Air Lines staff and their passengers. This photo was taken hours before the crash on December 29th while on board Flight 26 in Miami. 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