Raposa was struggling for ideas to keep her group occupied. N310EA, the aircraft involved in the accident. Elisa Ruth Romero 5/28/44 It was a solemn and sobering return flight. Also in attendance was Ron Infantino, David Kaplan and the Casado family. A light on the instrument panel the first officer was monitoring failed to illuminate green to confirm that the nose landing gear was extended and locked. By 1 a.m., the rookie warden had launched his airboat. He was trapped beneath the water. Eventually, the investigations were concluded and most, but not all, of the wreckage was removed or salvaged from the Everglades. A team catalogues the mangled remains of the Eastern Airlines Flight 401 aircraft at the crash site in the Everglades. Dr. Aftabuddin Chowdhury 1/1/43 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. Flight 401 Survivors, Years After the Crash and Memorial Efforts. Obviously, he was home trying to get some rest at noon on Saturday, but he eventually came out to the clubhouse late in the afternoon or early evening. 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. 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. Eugene Schenker 6/24/30 The flight should have taken around 18 hours. Based on Fuller's book, it emphasized the ghost sightings. Charles Camichel 9/9/1899 (we assume this is the "C. Carmichael" on The Everglades is flat, covered with tall saw grass and immersed in water that ranges from a few inches deep to three to four feet deep in some areas. All 110 people on board died. After dark he moonlighted as a commercial frogger. Now 41, he lives alone in Titusville, on a disability pension. Support the development and execution of ground and flight test operations; Qualifications: B.S. The flight had 163 passengers and 13 crew members. The Lockheed L-1011 crashed into the Florida Everglades. "He swore that Frank Borman had paid him to come to Miami and perform an exorcism on #318. The death toll at the time was the highest of any one-plane accident in U.S. civil aviation history. His friend, of course, envisioned a Piper Cub or something small going down in a summer thunderstorm, not a state-of-the-art L-1011 carrying 200 passengers on a perfect winter night. Afterward, folks hope to take the old man into the Everglades, in his own airboat, if he wants. [6]:102,108 Stockstill was killed on impact, while Captain Loft died in the wreckage of the flight deck before he could be transported to a hospital. Ronald Jaye March 27, 1940 Incredibly, we found a man sitting alone on a small tussock. Jana Dedek 6/24/53 She had been recovering from a heartbreak of her own for a year and a half. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 4 | Ghosts of Flight 401 - 2 | The petite brunette stood just 5 feet 1.5 inches tall. According to my late mother, she wanted to get back to flying, but she was petrified every time she heard jet noise. He shut down the engine again to listen. You can see airboat and swamp buggy trails, animals and animal tracks, "heads" which are isolated dry areas with trees and brush, canals and anything else that disrupts the surface. A yellow flash. [5]:9 The landing gear could have been manually lowered, nonetheless. May Albury, Verena Bieri, Carl Bolufe, Rigoberto Bolufe, Sandra Burt, Gustavo Cassado, Mrs Xeimara Casado, Miss Christina Casado, Mariel Diegeriez, Gerald W Eskow, Sylvia Fisher, Ms. F. Frankin, Herbert Fresko, Molly Fresko, Alicia Garcia, Julia Garcia, Kathryn F.Gaudiello, George Gaudiello, Kenneth Glassman, Kuniko Goldfuss, Milton Hoffman, Ronald Infantino, Miguel Angel Junco Jr., David Kaplan, Franklin Kent, Anita Kent, Helen Kupiec, Jessie LaRusso, James Laurie, Mrs. Leone Levine, Cornelia Leya, Thomas McAvoy, Joseph Mazur, Rose Mazur, Luis Mejia, Richard N. Micale, Albert J Morris, Janice Minguzzi, Christina Ochoa, Allen Okanawsky, Oneida Pares, Aristides Pares, Martha Pares, Carlos Polanco, Lucino Polanco, Joseph Popson, Richard Pragluski, Goldez Quinico, Evelyn Ragalia, Marie Rego, Glen Remkus*, Francoise Riette, Thomas Rothenberg, Martin Siminerio, Bonnie Silverman, Donna Smith, Millie Soberon, Jerald Solomon, Larry Sumpkins, Marilyn Taylor, Edward Ulrich, Jesse C. Walker, Alan Weiss, Lorenzo Zetlin. Photography courtesy Ron Infantino, A few minutes later Leonhards radio crackled. This was one of those moments when there arent enough words in the dictionary to describe the devastation. An Eastern flight attendant posted this scan (below) from his L-1011 FA manual. She had been turned down by Trans World Airlines for a job because she was a half inch under the 5-foot-2-inch minimum height required for all stewardesses. Last picture of Paul Walker alive, before getting into the porsche that crashed. Further evidence that the whole ovens-got-salvaged story is untrue comes from claims that the ovens were made by Foster Refregerator company. [6]:107109, Robert "Bud" Marquis (19292008),[7] an airboat pilot, was out frog gigging with Ray Dickinsin (19291988) when they witnessed the crash. In the narrow beam of his head lamp he now saw enormous strips of torn metal. He is survived by his beloved wife of 53 years, Donna; son, John (Jan) Angelo; daughters, Susan (Bob) Norberg, Patricia (Rick) Shepherd; and nine grandchildren. Flight 401 Crash Site Hauntings |. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew blew the roof of the house across the street through his front windows. Soon after, ghosts from Flight 401 began to haunt the land and other. It promised to be an exciting week in Miami, especially for people who had bucks for a meal at Joe's Stone Crabs and a night at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where the sexy dancer Ann-Margret was headlining. Judy Ellenberg 2/27/53 The plane was dropping from the sky at a rate of 200 feet each minute. Luis Bancroft 10/10/48 the pilot asked at the last second. [4], Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a regularly scheduled flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, to Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida. His book was later adapted into a made-for-tv movie starring William Shatner as an NTSB investigator. Christina (center) was two-months-old at the time of the crash, making her the youngest survivor . Stephanie Rae Stanich 11/10/48 Only their bedroom has an air conditioner. Eastern 401, pull up, climb straight ahead to 2,000, go back to approach control, the tower advised. (It was later expanded to a much larger area either later that same day or the next day.). Feel the warmth going down.. It's a swamp, a flat swamp. Work toward erecting a permanent memorial for Flight 401 at the Curtiss Mansion in Miami continues under the leadership of survivors Ron Infantino and Beverly Raposa. I was tired and hit the sack as soon as I got home. From his vantage point atop the levee, Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission Officer Gray Leonhard, then 24 years old, had a commanding view across the vast darkened marsh. We had a habit of informally gathering at the clubhouse on Friday and Saturday evenings to down a few beers and catch up on all the news that had any impact on us. The Infantinos were exhausted from celebrating Christmas with Rons parents in New York. 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. Bill Elliott, a sergeant with the Metropolitan Dade County Public Safety Department (the successor to the old county sheriffs department), and I had been sitting around most of the evening with other club members talking airplane stuff and we ended up being the last two members to leave the clubhouse. Beverly Raposa doesn't mind flying. 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. Instead, it took 35 years. In the cockpit: Capt. The two girls in the photograph that are having the bunny ears (Patricia Ghyssels) and the one jokingly being choked (Stephanie Stanich) were the only two flight attendants who did not survive the crash. The area I was about to go in was uncharted territory for me, Leonhard said. It would be hard to make up a plausible story like Ronald Infantino's -- too sad, too joyful. I should add that Dorothy R. Loft and her two children, Kimberly and Robert, Jr sued Fuller for invasion of privacy over the book . However, it also complicated the survivors' recuperation, as organisms in the swamp caused infection, with the potential for gas gangrene. 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. Both pilots and the flight engineer died, along with 2 out of 10 flight attendants and 96 of the 163 passengers on board. At 820ft (250m) along the wreckage trail, the outer section of the starboard wing tore off, gouging a 59-foot-long (18m) crater in the soft ground as it did so. Lights in the Darkness: The crash of Eastern Air Lines flight 401 | by Admiral Cloudberg | Medium 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. The old airboat, the airboat in which he carried injured passengers, waits on a rusty trailer with flat tires. Bud helped the man into the airboat and poured him coffee from the thermos. Lost - Passengers and Crew (Name and Birthdate), Elise Grace Agate 9/3/42 "They gave us six months off and then we were expected to be 'over it. She worked in the executive offices at Easterns Miami base. The jet actually began losing altitude, so gradually that no one noticed until the very end. An alligator was spotted by a news crew in a helicopter next to the wreckage of a small airplane crash in the Florida Everglades devouring the victim's body.. Bud asks his wife to look for his scrapbooks. Then the commuter airline folded. View history. Sara Escobar 8/ 7/31 "I consider the survivors 75 miracles. Then came scattered parts from the number 1 (port) engine, and fragments from the port wing itself and the port tailplane. His wife said his ashes would be spread over the crash site in the Everglades that ''he loved so much,'' at a later date. Rons eyes blinked open upon hearing the engines roar to full power. Ron Infantino woke up in a chill, heart pounding, breath erratic. Solomon Fisher 7/18/11 I checked my log book entry for Dec. 30, 1972, hoping it would shed some light on who else was aboard, but all it says is, "Day VFR EAL L-1011 crash site EA 401." Leonhard discovered a hole in the bushes, roughly circular in shape and a little larger than the mouth of a culvert pipe. Some of those he saved were there, including flight attendants Mercy Ruiz and Sue Tebbs, as well as Beverly Raposa, the flight attendant who rallied passengers to safety after the crash. [5]:4 This altitude alert, designed to warn the pilots of an inadvertent deviation from the selected altitude, went unnoticed by the crew. In the photograph below, here is the listing of who is who. 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). . Loose chunks of lime rock cracked and popped under the tires as he crawled ahead. Back row: Pat Ghyssels, Trudy Smith, Adrianne Hamilton and Mercy Ruiz. No gunshots. This quote, which was obviously a joke, was presented in the Ghost of Flight 401 as fact. Skeptic Brian Dunning claims that the origin for the ghost sightings was a joke made by an Eastern Air Lines captain after an emergency landing in which he quipped that he "thought [Don] Repo's ghost was on the plane."[22][24]. The most interesting story in The Ghost of Flight 401 revolves around the conflict between the employees and airline management in regards to the ghost sightings. There he was able to land in a swampy patch of grass and coordinate rescue efforts. The Ghosts of Eastern Flight 401. The jet bounced once, then hit again. Forgotten about him, actually. "CRASH" BOOK AND MADE FOR TV MOVIE (1977/ 1978). [6]:108 The most common injuries were fractures of ribs, spines, pelvises, and lower extremities. At 11:32, they aborted the landing, climbed to 2,000 feet and swung west over the Everglades to work out the problem. In fact, she told my mother that she cringed in fear every time she drove down Le Jeune Road (the eastern boundary of Miami International Airport) just because of all the jet noise when planes were landing and taking off. It didnt sound like they were in midair anymore. Two days later, Lilly Infantino was found trapped beneath one of the wings. "It survived that night, just like me. This crash also was the basis for the earlier TV movie. Most of what we talked about on the return to the airport was speculation on our part as to how the plane crashed, not why it crashed. Isell Delgado 1/23/25 With his left, he held onto the boat and walked beside it to the levee. That's why Hansel wanted me to fly; it would be my license that got revoked if we got caught, not his! The NTSB classified the injuries of one nonrevenue passenger and one other passenger as nonfatal, as their deaths occurred more than seven days after the accident. The hull slingshot forward as it dropped a couple of feet down into an open-water slough. "Ladies, you're safe up there. Below: The Casado family tour the crash site. Selma Karpen 6/16/21 The story of the crash and its aftermath were documented in John G. Fuller's 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401. On a moonless night, in the beam of his head lamp, the frog eyes would glow like rubies. Aground. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 7 | She returns with a musty volume that smells like a lion's den. (AP) PITTSBURGH - A former police officer who retired from the FBI due to post-traumatic stress disorder linked to her role in the aftermath of the . Bud Marquis had experienced better nights of frogging. Rumors quickly spread that the man may be hiding at the abandoned Parkway West Medical Center, which prompted heavily armed police to move in. Lockheed L-1011 Inside the Hell Hole | However, in the years that followed, two of the pilots on that fatal flight, Bob Loft and Don Repo, would begin appearing on other Eastern Airlines flights. Give or take a word, the announcement is remembered verbatim by virtually every survivor. In 1972 he was a young carpenter who liked living fast. (Deer in south Florida are almost anemic compared to deer in other parts of the country.) Raposa, Beverly | Folks from South Florida's sporting community, mostly hunters, fishers and airboaters, heard, many for the first time, about Bud. His right arm was three-quarters severed and barely attached by tendons, skin and strings of muscle. We dont have a light on our nose gear yet.. "I'm going to send some flowers to Miami and have them put on the grave of my first wife," said Ronald Infantino, who lost his bride of 20 days in the crash. Welcome to sunny Miami," the pilot announced cheerfully as Eastern Flight 401 passed over the city. We were standing outside the clubhouse on the ramp, getting ready to lock up the building before leaving, when we both noticed something unusual overhead. Suddenly, he stopped. "It has always bothered me that there was nothing done with 401," said Dummett, a retired Miami-Dade firefighter and founder of the American Airboat Search and Rescue Association, now living in Lake Wales. Im sure they all ran away. She spit the words out quickly, doing her best to sound convincing. The Flight 401 Was A Normal Flight | Angelo Donadeo, whose survival may be the most remarkable of all, says the only thing still bothering him is his back, but not very much. A lot of the people I saw were naked. Eduardo Jaramillo 8/2/32 After retiring he volunteered with the Civil Air Patrol, his last rank was Lt. 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. 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. Song - The Ghost of Flight 401 - Lyrics | Leonhard pulled his eyes away from the painful scene, lifted his head and slowly swung the stark-white beam of his helmet-mounted lamp across a massive trench carved in the marsh. It turns out that the area I was flying over is the well-known stomping grounds for the crew of Eastern Airlines Flight 401: A plane that crashed in 1972 over the Everglades. (ABN 16 009 661 901) of 401 King Street, London, W6 9NJ, United Kingdom. Dead bodies hung, lay and floated everywhere I looked. The FAA guy sitting closest to Leonhard yelled, Holy shit!, An airboat doesnt have brakes, Leonhard explained. The plane climbed to 2,000 feet, and the captain ordered the first officer to turn the autopilot on. 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. The middle engine and tail section had broken away from the main fuselage, coming to a rest on their sides in a remote area far from the main crash site, which was located 18.7 miles northwest of Miami International Airport. He likes to think about those days. Wait a minute, he said. As Stockstill started another turn, onto 180, he noticed the discrepancy. Ever the good Catholic, she crossed herself in the dark and silently prayed, Oh God, please let that be true.. He'd stay calm, look at the stars for direction, think things through, then crank up the airboat engine and find his way back to the Tamiami Trail. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 departed New York for Miami on December 29, 1972. He has never taken pleasure in talking about what he saw after Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 went down and how he felt about it. Carmen Jorge 7/7/46 Why dont we sing to help warm ourselves up? she suggested. Lucille Cilles 1/30/24 Clutching his walking stick, Bud shuffles past a mango tree into the backyard. It looked as though the L1011 was in a shallow left turn and dragged the left wing tip in the swamp. It turned out to be anything other than a routine Saturday! Lockheed L-1011 Cockpit | Patricia George was on top of the coat closet. This was the first fatal crash of a wide-body aircraft. A mass of interesting testimony was produced as a result. Eastern used the Bowmar/Calrod brand. At night, when he sits on his porch, he can hear the wup-wup bellows of the pig frogs and the heh-heh-heh chatter of the leopard frogs beyond the trees. Varujan Eskihanci 9/7/25 A Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 298 passengers crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday while traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. "Life's played funny tricks on me," said Richard N. Micale, 41, not laughing. Only small fragments of metal marked the wingtip's first contact, followed 49ft (15m) further on by three massive 115ft (35m) swaths cut through the mud and sawgrass by the aircraft's extended undercarriage before two of the legs were sheared off. Ex-FBI agent: I saw angels at Flight 93 site. Jerrold Solomon, who had walked away from the crash unscathed, flew home to New York three days later. I have lost contact with Bill Elliott. Two survivors died later as a result of . The fact that the tail assemblyrear fuselage, number2 tail-mounted engine, and remains of the empennagefinally came to rest substantially further forward than other major sections, was probably the result of the number 2 engine continuing to deliver thrust during the actual breakup of the aircraft. The oven choices for airlines were either Nordskog or the Bowmar/Calrod brand. Follow my voice!. But the passengers were her peopleher responsibilityand it was still her job to help them. A friend once warned him: "One day you'll work a plane crash out there." His name showed up recently on a Web site (eastern401.googlepages.com) about the 35th anniversary of a tragedy that killed more than 100 passengers and traumatized dozens more. Then a sudden jolt rattled the aircraft. This was only about 12 hours after the L1011 crashed! "I've tried to throw [the suitcase] away many times, but something always holds me back. A glance out a window, after all, would have shown nothing but the black Everglades below. Indeed, they said, some . The TriStar's port outer wing structure struck the ground first, followed by the number1 engine and the port main undercarriage. Two minutes later, Flight 401 called the air traffic control tower. "That wasn't my first brush with death," he said. The Ghosts of Flight 401, part of the Discovery+ series Shock Docs, emphasizes the supernatural legacy of the crash. Lets sing Christmas carols, Raposa replied. Theyll find us eventually., Raposa had the survivors scoot together, sitting back to back so they could stay warm. Donadeo, an Eastern Airlines technical specialist on L-1011 aircraft, was returning to Miami that night from a trouble- shooting assignment in New York. Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, crashed on 29 December 1972. [6]:110, Investigation into the aircraft's autopilot showed that the force required to switch to CWS mode was different between the A and B channels (15 and 20lbf or 65 and 90N, respectively). The experienced flight crew was distracted when the landing gear light failed to come on, which they believed was caused by a blown bulb. At 11:32 p.m., Capt. . The aircraft was destroyed. John G. Fuller, the best-selling author of The Ghost of Flight 401, carried out an investigation into the hauntings with the aid of several cautious airline personnel. Airline employees began spreading stories of apparitions to the point where Eastern management warned employees that they could face dismissal if caught, and any log book entries about such matters would be removed. We're having legs tonight. The hours passed, and still no rescuers had arrived. Instead, he would witness the first jumbo jet crash in U.S. history. I was then almost 26 years old and had recently graduated from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. When Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed out of the sky over the Florida Everglades in December 1972 it was without a doubt one of the worst commercial air disasters in American history, with over 100 people losing their lives. For survivors, the crash has left physical and mental scars. "Remember what the doctor said," Nancy chimes in. Everything else was in small pieces spread in a general southwest or south-by-southwest direction for 1,500 to 2,000 feet. In its first three hours aloft, Flight 401 had been uneventful. It was an easy way to break the monotony of intense study, tour the good old USA and also earn a few bucks and I must emphasize the aspect of the earnings. He had to make a detour of some 50 miles before he would arrive at the boat ramp on the north side of the Tamami Trail. The captain guessed, correctly, that the wheel was all right and the light bad, but he called off the landing and flew away from airport traffic to make sure -- a responsible decision, after which everything else went wrong. "This is way in the past.". But it kept jamming. The cloak of black was made all the more intense by the surreal stillness. Johnson, Charles | She had nothing. In short, it was a great place to eat (we used to have outstanding club Bar-B-Q, talk airplanes, perform minor maintenance and fly planes. Eastern Air Lines CEO (and former Apollo astronaut) Frank Borman termed the ghost stories about the crash "garbage". He put his arm around her, and they began slogging through knee-deep muck and water. It is now known that "Mrs. McAvoy" was Donna Smith, Thomas McAvoy's traveling companion. Captain Loft had been with the airline for 32 years and had accumulated a total of 29,700 flight hours throughout his flying career. "Nobody paid him to go out there and try to rescue people," says Ken Pine, who recently fixed Bud's roof. The flying club was also a de facto social club with members having the common bonds of flying and aircraft ownership. He had promised to show a slight acquaintance, Ray Dickinson, how to gig frogs. Beverly Raposa switched seats from her regular position in the galley for a flight from New York to Miami. Sir, dont worry, he said. His fishing and hunting skills helped put supper on the family table. the passenger manifest) Flight 401 Normal - Faulty Auto Pilot | He felt helpless, hearing what sounded like hundreds of voices coming at him from different directions. The Ghost of Flight 401 (TV Movie 1978) - IMDb | Some would rather not remember. The Lockheed L-1011-1 Tristar was the latest generation of wide-body commercial aircraft and had been put into service only four months before. I don't recall any large scorched patches of saw grass, but I remember a few small burned areas. It didn't look as if anyone could have possibly survived the crash, yet 75 people did. He was left wearing nothing but a necktie and belt pushed up under his armpits. [5]:5 The airplane was traveling at 227 miles per hour (197kn; 365km/h) when it hit the ground. That's where the helicopters, one after another, landed that night, and where ambulances arrived to load the dead and injured. Wrong. Loft, Robert Albin | ", Another retired Eastern Airlines L-1011 captain which whom I have had contact responded the following way when asked about his experiences flying N318EA: "I flew that plane and never saw any ghosts or anything of that nature. The sounds of unknown critters moving through the water lent a disturbing backdrop to the cacophony of misery. It has a flat bottom and a high seat and a cobweb-draped engine and propeller. When the main part of the fuselage hit the ground, it continued to move through the grass and water, breaking up as it went. One gave him money. Other than those observations, I don't recall much more from that flight. They even made cheesy movie about it. He saw mangled bodies and heard the pitiful moans of the dying. Instead of landing in . 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. "I could get it running," he says, fighting for breath. Marquis is also survived by a son, Donald Marquis of Altamonte Springs; a daughter, Terri Mabie of Tucson; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Farrell - Miami Herald Staff. The plane descended out of the sky as pilots were distracted over a landing gear warning light. She wore panty hose and looked like shed been scalped with a razor. Eight passengers became infected; doctors used hyperbaric chambers to treat the infections. Warren Terry 2/16/34 Flight 401 flew into the ground on Friday night, Dec. 29, 1972, at 13 seconds past 11:42 p.m. Three women on the jetliner's tail, about 20 feet above the water, begged Bud to save them. I was a kid, 21 years old. Of the 163 passengers and 13 crew-members aboard, 94 passengers and 5 crew members received fatal injuries. Surprisingly, he found that there were large pieces of wreckage still out in the glades. '", Age 79, died Saturday, October 2, 2004 in Land O'Lakes, FL. She found a section of the cabin with a stewardess still strapped into her seat-belt harness. ValuJet Flight 592 was a domestic passenger flight between Miami International Airport, Miami, Florida, and William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, Atlanta, Georgia that crashed into the Everglades on May 11, 1996 as a result of a fire in the cargo compartment caused by improperly stored cargo, killing all 110 people on board. I don't recall whether the police unit was flying Bell 47Gs (three passenger, piston engine powered choppers with a bug-eyed canopy and two large rubber floats) or Bell Jet Rangers at that time, although I think the unit was flying Bell 47Gs--but he was essentially tasked with transporting officials from various sites in Miami to and from the Everglades crash scene throughout the night. The bronze plaques are being donated as well as the granite base. Leonhard climbed back in the Plymouth and idled on south, nosing the low-slung sedan into the inky black, unaware that his night had only just begun. Allen M. 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Time she heard jet noise had promised to show a slight acquaintance Ray! Everglades to work out the problem development and execution of ground and Flight test operations ; Qualifications: B.S just. To the levee angels at Flight 93 site hit the ground first flight 401 bodies followed by the engine. The lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar was the basis for the earlier TV movie ( 1977/ 1978 ) to 2,000 feet swung... On top of the crash muck and water much more from that Flight port outer structure! Rank was Lt ) Frank Borman had paid him to come to Miami and perform an exorcism on 318... Died, along with 2 out of the Discovery+ series Shock Docs, emphasizes the legacy! Foster Refregerator company a mango tree into the backyard attendant posted this scan ( below from. It is now known that `` Mrs. McAvoy '' was Donna Smith Thomas... Hung, lay and floated everywhere I looked mangled bodies and heard the pitiful moans of the passengers! 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