Eastern Airlines Flight 401 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades on the night of December 29, 1972, causing 98 fatalities. It was the first crash of a "jumbo jet."The plane was four months old Lockheed L-1011 and was carrying 160 passengers and 12 crewmembers.
The flight had been normal until the final approach into Miami International Airport. When co-pilot Bert Stockstill had looked at the landing gear indicator, the green light that identifies that the gear is properly locked in the 'down' position did not illuminate. This failure has two possible explanations: either the gear was not down, or the light was not working. The pilots recycled the gear. When the light still did not come on, they aborted the landing to examine the situation. The tower instructed the L-1011 airplane to pull out of its decent, climb to two thousand feet (610 m), and then make a U-turn and flight west over the darkness of the Everglades.
The cockpit crew removed the light assembly and the flight engineer was dispatched into the hell hole to visually check if the gear was down. Fifty seconds after reaching their assigned altitude and when the plane was halfway through its U-turn, the captain, Robert Loft, instructed Stockstill to put the L-1011 on autopilot. For the next eighty seconds the plane maintained level flight. Then it dropped one hundred feet (30 m), and then again flew level for two more minutes, after which it began a descent so gradual it could not be perceived by the crew. In the next seventy seconds, the plane lost only 250 feet (76 m), but this was enough to trigger the altitude warning C-note chime located under the engineer's work station. The engineer, Don Repo, had gone below, and there was no indication by the pilot's voices that they heard the chime. In another fifty seconds, the plane was at half its assigned altitude. At the moment when Stockstill's radio altimeter beeped the plane was passing through one hundred and one feet (31 m), the plane was dropping at 50 ft/s (15 m/s). The cockpit crew heard the warning, but it was too late.
For reasons unknown, the autopilot had become disengaged. Investigators believe it was accidentally turned off when the captain leaned against the steering column while turning to speak to the flight engineer.
The 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. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew's attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed."
94 passengers and 5 crewmembers died during the crash and two more died of injuries later. The incident was due to burned-out light bulbs with a replacement value of twelve dollars. The landing gear was found to be in the down and locked position.
The crash inspired the Hollywood movie The Ghost Of Flight 411. Due to that, the actual flight is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Eastern Airlines Flight 411 (instead of 401).
See also:Lists of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners
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