Eastern Airlines Flight 401.........34 years ago today

[FlyingColors]

See sites

http://eastern401.googlepages.com/ Only known photos of aircraft N310EA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Ai ... Flight_401

http://www.subversiveelement.com/Flight ... Lines.html

http://www.freshgasflow.com/flight401.htm Has a blow by blow record of events. Errie feeling that she was to line up on 4L at MIA. That's where "the holes" are in the fence for pictures and spotting. She never made it.


Seems like yesterday I was watching the TV movie "The ghost of flight 401"

[moose135]

I remember when 401 crashed, and the subsequent ghost stories.

Hard to believe they let it fly into the ground while they screwed around with a faulty indicator. They forgot rules for aviation are
1 - Fly the airplane
2 - Analyze the situation
3 - Take appropriate action

Without #1, the others don't mean much.

[NIKV69]

I remember how Frank Borman (who at the time was an exec and not CEO yet) rushed to the scene to assist survivors. A great man in aviation. I also have the book about the ghost stories, good reading.

[mirrodie]

I'd love to see that movie. I'm not familiar with that accident.

[T-Bird76]

The two movies were pretty decent "The crash of flight 401" and the "Ghost of flight 401". Interesting thing about the Ghost movie, they didn't use Eastern's name, they used a mock airline "Atlantic Southeastern Airlines" ASA, which today as we know is a real airline.

[G-BOAD]

I want to see the movies, thanks. What happnes was (fix me if I'm wrong, don't know this 100%) EA 401, a tristar was flying from jfk to miami when the front landing gear would not lower, crew tryed to fix, and did not see plane was falling b/c of fog. Crashed into everglades.

Then the ghost stories started when the dead pilots were found onboard another ea tristar 401 and stuff like that. I think one said something like check E1 and latter E1 had a problem

[Nonstop2AUH]

The whole thing was very sad, I once saw an online memorial to one of the young FAs on this flight and it made me think about how, no matter how long ago it was, these were real people with families and friends and aspirations in life and they should not be forgotten. Also, the lessons of this and other accidents should not be forgotten.

As I understand it, the aircraft type was fairly new to the fleet at the time and perhaps the crew's level of training and experience with it was just not up to properly handling this situation. Remember that 30+ years ago the level of simulation and the quality of synthetic flight training was not at all what it is today, so there was no reliable and practiced procedure for many eventualities. Basically the crew let themselves get distracted by something that they didn't know how to handle and shouldn't have been a big deal, with disastrous consequences. If there is any positive here, it's that I think alot of lessons were learned from this incident that prevented such future incidents.

[hiss srq]

I think the bird in question had less than 1,000 hours on the frame