flight 401 victims

This position is with the Agency Services area of DTMB. A graveside service will take place on Friday, December 4, at 10:30 AM. The apparitions of Loft and Repo were invariably described as being extremely lifelike. An Eastern representative told Serling that, while pondering whether to sue Fuller or his publisher: We spent weeks trying to locate anyone who claimed to have seen a ghost and couldn't find one person. 21 Mar 2017. Silvia Crespo 11/30/32 Each year on December 29th, I spend a little time thinking about that silhouetted L1011 heading west over Opa locka Airport. To those who survived, the scene must have had an eerie end-of-the-earth feel, with wisps of gray mist swirling, a baby wailing, the groans from the injured and the dying. Selma Karpen 6/16/21 On December of 1972, an Eastern Airlines Tri-Star jetliner, Flight 401, crashed into a Florida swamp. The lack of confirmation from the interior landing light signal so consumed the entire crews attention, that none of them noticed that one of them had inadvertently switched off the autopilot. Jose Garcia 6/4/47 The appearance of the dead flight engineer was confirmed by the flight engineer. All three of Loft, Stockstill, and Repo were among the unlucky majority who perished. He ended up making numerous trips out to the levee where the rescue operation base was located. It was the first accident involving a wide-bodied airliner, and the most deadly crash in the United States at that time. Surprisingly, he found that there were large pieces of wreckage still out in the glades. 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. 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. Am I the only one left alive? he wondered. He was out there gigging frogs when it happened. There were also other artifacts such as yellow airline life preservers and panes of plastic passenger windows. Other than those observations, I don't recall much more from that flight. Serling also tracked down the Mexico City emergency landing, and found, predictably, that there was no truth whatsoever to the story of a face appearing in an oven window. She described him as dazed and unresponsive. 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. Trudy is survived by her nephews, Jason Mooney and wife Annette, Jeremy Ogelsby and wife Amy; great-nephews, Nathan Mooney and wife Courtney, Caleb Mooney and wife Savannah, and Brandon Ogelsby; great-nieces, Laura Mooney and Alaura Ogelsby;2 great-great-nephews and 2 great-great-nieces; cousins, Jacque Wirta and Jack Moncrief. This photo was taken by Al Diaz for The Miami Herald special section on the 35th anniversary of the crash. I saw people burned in agony. Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-1011 TriStar 1. Rose Lina Zollo 7/13/43. Another pilot on another flight was seriously concerned when he heard knocking coming from beneath the cockpit itself. In his mind, he's still a strapping young fellow with big muscles. (The club is still in existence at the Opa locka Airport, but it was relocated to a different site on the field years ago.) Seventy-five miraculously survived. Two later died, leaving 75 survivors and 101 fatalities. 2022 TV-14. 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. This was not the only sighting registered. The pilot of this flight was so unnerved by all of this that he canceled the flight. A friend once warned him: "One day you'll work a plane crash out there." Imagine his surprise when he came face to face with Don Repo. Now that the crash site was again open to the public, he had gone out into the Everglades to scout the area on his air boat. She was the first victim, along with her unborn son, discovered by the search team at 12:30 pm, December 30th), Patricia Renee Shackelford 12/9/52 (Pictured below). Well launch from there.. None of them realized in the dark that they were gradually descending, as their attention was on debugging the landing gear indicator. PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Farrell - Miami Herald Staff. It was somewhere between 11:30 pm and 11:35 pm, a fact that I specifically remember because I took the time to look at my wristwatch and comment to Bill. Following the crash, Raposa was praised for her valor. Back in the day, when he spent so much time in the wilderness, only the airplanes overhead reminded him of civilization. Inside the planes cockpit, the crew was trying to slide in a replacement bulb, a roughly two-square-inch all-in-one light assembly unit covered by a translucent green plastic lens, valued at $12 altogether. 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. Eastern's L-1011's came equipped with six Bowmar ovens (Lockheed Part Number 671878-115). Frightened, they called the flight deck, and the flight engineer came down to have a look for himself. Forgotten about him, actually. Pin. He lost interest in his job and just wanted to be alone. Bud wants to. What was so strange was that it was there in the first place. Captain Bob Loft survived the impact but was so severely injured that he died during the rescue efforts. Dr. Aftabuddin Chowdhury 1/1/43 He saw openings in the sawgrass created by sliding chunks of broken airplane. It seemed to help. Solomon Fisher 7/18/11 40 were killed on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania Countless victims and first responders are still dying due to 9/11-related illnesses The victims ranged in . Two days later, Lilly Infantino was found trapped beneath one of the wings. That area was off limits to hunters and others for a number of months while federal investigators searched the area for clues to the crash. The final leg of the flight was canceled as a result of this fire. Someone had seen his frogging light. 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. . A crawlspace beneath a cockpit is one thing, a galley oven is quite another. The only thing she was looking forward to on arrival in Miami was going to bed. Little did I expect to see what he actually had. He carried survivors to safety and made them as comfortable as he could. In the narrow beam of his head lamp he now saw enormous strips of torn metal. But fortunately, it is not the only source available to us. 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. Thats what youre going to get when we get out of here. By the time I got to the clubhouse, there must have been 10 to 15 members milling about, all discussing the crash. Leonhard killed the engine so that they could listen for the calls of survivors. Flight 401 - Autopilot indicator | It was quite possible that the landing gear was in the correct configuration. Frank Borman called it all a bunch of "crap" and considered suing the producers of the 1978 made-for-TV movie about the ghost stories for libel. Richard J. Schulleri 1/3/43 If you hear my voice, come toward me. Read the accident report (PDF). They also told me that Bill had been called shortly after he got home by the police department helicopter unit to come back to the airport (the police helicopter unit was based at Opa locka) for emergency flight duty. For a minute I thought [Don] Repo's ghost was on the plane.". The other flight crew members were First Officer John Stockhill, a flight engineer, and Donald Luis Repo, an aircraft mechanic, and flight engineer. Not a single usable part was salvaged from the wreckage, and not a single component that crashed with Flight 401 was ever installed in another aircraft. 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. 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 (99 initial crash fatalities, two died shortly afterward). Rose Marie Cillis - Mark Paternoster May 15, 2021, 11:07 pm. A pale glow lightened the sky above Miami more than 40 miles away. Viewers who enter The Ghost of Flight 401 looking for shivers and thrills might be disappointed. The breakdown and subsequent emergency landing did in fact happen, and was covered in a tongue-in-cheek brief in the journal of the Flight Safety Foundation. Top Left: The girls of Flight 401. The cloak of black was made all the more intense by the surreal stillness. Infantino, 47, is an independent insurance broker in San Antonio, a few minutes' drive from home in Dade City. 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. 35 Years after an Eastern Air Lines jet crashed into the Everglades, a rescuer looks back. Unable to move and weak from severe loss of blood, his body hung suspended in the watery muck, still bent in the sitting position. "Remember what the doctor said," Nancy chimes in. "Then I saw this great big fireball and the whole 'glades lit up. At first, witnesses reported nothing more severe than standing in the aisles, occupying the galley and cockpit. In it, at a party a few weeks after the emergency landing, someone asked one of the pilots how it had been to land an L-1011 on only one engine. Beverly Raposa stumbled out of the nightmarish apocalypse, hurt, disheveled and covered in clumps of dripping swamp grasses. "Hey, what's happening here?" Pilots of Eastern Airline Flight 401 Don Repo and Bob Loft. Hey, whats happening here? the captain shouted. The Infantinos were exhausted from celebrating Christmas with Rons parents in New York. On December 3rd 2007, survivors of Eastern Air Lines flight 401 gathered at the Metro-Dade Firefighters' Memorial Building in Miami to honor Robert "Bud" Marquis, and to remember those who lost their lives in the crash nearly 35 years ago. One of the world's newest and flashiest airliners, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, was making one of its first flights for Eastern Air Lines on December 29, 1972. 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. 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. Something was wrong with the landing gear or the landing-gear light on the control panel. He was 79. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 5 | Sign up! AlanNachmias 5/16/50 There were 75 at the time, 20 years ago tonight. Ever the good Catholic, she crossed herself in the dark and silently prayed, Oh God, please let that be true.. I'd be able to do the right thing today.". It has a flat bottom and a high seat and a cobweb-draped engine and propeller. Bill was a career police officer who had been exposed to death and trauma, but his comments really reflected an attitude of both wonder and sadness. Evelyn De Salazar 11/6/08 Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades on a moonless night on December 29, 1972. After graduation, he hitchhiked to Oregon and California to visit relatives, returning to Connecticut a couple of years later. The petite brunette stood just 5 feet 1.5 inches tall. Repo seemed to have a knack of turning up in the oddest of places. 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. His doctor warned him not to travel alone, not with his weak heart and lungs and aching back. We're having legs tonight. An Eastern flight attendant posted this scan (below) from his L-1011 FA manual. Despite the crewsattempts to lower the landing gear, the signal that it was down and locked failed to appear. Leonhard doesnt remember which one. Jerome Becker 6/27/39 Interment will follow at 2pm at Florida National Cemetery. 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