Posted on 12/01/2007 9:00:27 AM PST by ConservativeStatement
The tragic night began routinely enough. Bound for Miami, Flight 401 took off from New York's JKF airport at 9:20 p.m.
In the cockpit: Capt. Robert Loft, 55; First Officer Albert Stockstill, 39; Second Officer Donald Repo, 51, all of Miami-Dade.
Loft, an Eastern employee since 1951 when Eddie Rickenbacker was his boss, spent the morning doing yard work before heading to MIA.
The flight had 163 passengers and 13 crew members, with 50 empty seats.
Raposa and Ruiz, along with some of the other flight attendants, slipped aboard at the last minute, arriving late to New York from a connecting flight.
"Can you believe we actually ran to get on that plane?" said Raposa, now 60, of Sunrise.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
As a student pilot it was repeatedly drilled into me that regardless of what else was happening “Fly the damn plane”.
Thats the one with all the “haunted” airplane parts that got salvaged and put on other airplanes.
The Ghost Of Flight 401
(Bob Welch)
You’ve had about the Flying Dutchman
The ghost of all the ships at sea
But just in case you think it’s lies
Then here’s a ghost for our own time
You see there was a crash at night
And the pilots in command all died
And after many months had passed
The widows all had cried their last
(chorus)
And when the moon shines on the silver wing
When the moon shines on the silver wing
When the moon shines, look out here comes the ghost of flight 401...
The ghost of flight 401, appeared aboard the jet airplanes
In flesh & blood & clothes he came
On an eastern airline I can’t name
But suddenly the ghost appeared
Of the pilots that had died that year
I’m not saying they were puffs of smoke
They were real as life, it ain’t no joke
(repeat chorus)
Ooh those silver wings
Yeah those silver wings
Yeah there shinin’ in that sun
The ghost of flight 401
Follow-up - Southwest Engine Failure Published by Michael November 27th, 2007 in Photos, Aviation News and Aviation Safety.
http://blog.flightstory.net/437/follow-up-southwest-engine-failure/ 
My students do not fly their aircraft into the dirt if I have any input into the matter.
That is "rule number one" in aviation. Rules 2 through 10 have half the value (combined) of rule #1.
Especially if you are in the right seat, eh?
It was as a Crime Scene Investigator that this Everglades crash came into my life. CSI was tasked in retrieving bodies, mapping the scene, and recovering evidence from the crash site.
The scene was a vast expanse of tall, sharp-edged sawgrass growing in 18" of water with deep potholes in the porous limestone rock every few feet. Jet fuel covered everything.
Rows of aircraft seats—ejected fully from the split fuselage—had bodies still strapped in them. Most were stripped of their clothing and shoes by the crash. Many of us suffered skin eruptions from hours immersed in the fuel at the scene. It took many days to fully detail the scene, recover bodies, and recover evidence.
>>>>“Fly the damn plane” until it is parked, chocked, and all the things that go round and round have stopped moving.
(and the master switch is off, so you don’t have a dead battery next time you want to fly. Proping a Lance is not fun. :~))
An acquaintance of mine (older brother of a good buudy) was on a plane that crashed in Miami, but I don’t believe it was this one. I think the plane he was on went off the runway into the water circa early ‘80s(?), and most (or all) of the passengers survived. My acquaintance helped get people out of the water and off the plane after the crash.
You don’t get to know too many plane crash survivors.....
I worked for EAL, for a time, in the late 80’s. Aircraft #318, another L1011 was the infamous ‘Ghost Plane’, and had recieved most of the salvageable parts from the crashed L1011. I was always weird working around that aircraft after hearing the stories of experiences on it.
Sounds more like a January, 1982 incident in Boston.
Though I forget the specifics, the deceased in that crash were related and some speculated that their deaths were bogus and they were actually living the good life somewhere. The bodies were never found. Again, hazy memory.
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