#flight 401

FLIGHT 401

On the night of Friday, 29 December 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401, an L-1011 jumbo, was carrying 176 people as it prepared to land at Miami Airport. Captain Bob Loft and Second Officer and flight engineer Don Repo were engaged in routine landing procedures when a warning light flashed indicating a problem with the landing gear. What they didn't realize was that the plane was actually descending much faster than it should have and seconds later it crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing 101 people on impact. Captain Loft survived the crash but died before he could be pulled from the wreck, and Officer Repo died a day later. Eastern Airlines salvaged much of the aeroplane and redistributed parts among similar aircraft in their fleet.

Soon after this redistribution there were reported sightings of the ghosts of Repo and Loft in the planes that had received spare parts from Flight 401. Repo's ghost was said to appear frequently, in the cockpit and in the galley. According to accounts from crew members he seemed to be very concerned about safety, pointing out fire hazards and hydraulic leaks. Loft's ghost was also seen sitting either in first class or in the crew's cabin. On one occasion a stewardess who saw him aboard and could not identify him from her passenger list reported him to her flight captain. The flight captain recognized Loft, who vanished before the eyes of a dozen or so witnesses present. Other strange happenings attributed to the ghosts of Repo and Loft were a tool mysteriously appearing in the hand of a flight engineer, a plane's power suddenly coming on, and messages and warnings on the public address system.

Eastern Airlines were sceptical of the reports of sightings and suggested counselling for those involved at the company's expense. Despite their scepticism, however, they did eventually remove all of the salvaged parts of Flight 401 from the aircraft they had been put into. Almost immediately after the 401 parts were removed from the planes the sightings ended.

The alleged hauntings remain a mystery. Eastern Airlines no longer functions but the story of Flight 401 was published in a best-selling book, The Ghost of Flight 401 (1976) by John Fuller.

GHOST FLIGHT 401

This is a true story. My great uncle used to work at Eastern Airlines and told this story to my family. He told the story about seeing Don Repo himself as he was checking an Aircraft. He also told us about the missing logbooks, the ones about the ghostsightings. Everyone who reported seeing a had to be okay by a psychiatrist before going back to work.

The accident and the subsequent ghost story were mentioned by Dan Aykroyd on the Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson on the 6th of June 1984.

Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a scheduled flight from New York JFK to Miami. Shortly before midnight on December 29, 1972, the Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar crashed into the Florida Everglades causing 101 fatalities. The pilots and the flight engineer, two of 10 flight attendants, and 96 of 163 passengers died;

75 flight engineer,passengers and crew survived.

This was the worst avionic crash in history.

The crash occurred while the entire cockpit crew was preoccupied with the burnt-out landing gear.

The cockpit crew removed the light assembly 102 and Second Officer Repo was dispatched to the avionics bay beneath the flight deck to confirm via a small porthole if the landing gear was indeed down. Fifty seconds after reaching their assigned altitude, Captain Loft instructed First Officer Stockstill to put the L-1011 on autopilot. For the next 80 seconds, the plane maintained level flight. Then, it dropped 100 ft (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.[5]: 4 In the next 70 seconds, the plane lost only 250 ft (76 m), but this was enough to trigger the altitude warning C-chord chime located under the engineer's workstation. The engineer (Repo) had gone below, and no indication was heard of the pilots' voices recorded on the CVR that they heard the chime. In another 50 seconds, the plane was at half its assigned altitude.

As Stockstill started another turn, onto 180°, he noticed the discrepancy. The following conversation was recovered from the flight voice recorder later:

Stockstill: We did something to the altitude.

Loft: What?

Stockstill: We're still at 2,000 feet, right?

Loft: Hey—what's happening here?

Less than 10 seconds after this exchange, the jetliner crashed:

Cockpit area microphone (CAM): [Sound of click]

CAM: [Sound of six beeps similar to radio altimeter increasing in rate]

CAM: (Sound of initial impact.)

The location was west-northwest of Miami, 18.7 mi (30.1 km) from the end of runway 9L. The were 4 ypuooplane was traveling at 227 miles per hour (197 kn; 365 km/h) when it hit the ground. With the aircraft in mid-turn, the left wingtip hit the surface first, then the left engine and the left landing gear, making three trails through the sawgrass, each 5 ft (1.5 m) wide and over 100 ft (30 m) long. When the main part of the fuselage hit the ground, it continued to move through the grass and water, breaking up as it went on the ground.

Ryan Sprague, host of the Somewhere in the Skies podcast and co-host of the CW television series Mysteries Decoded, wrote about Flight 401 for a paranormal website in 2017. He notes the consistency of the reported sightings and the innocuous and/or helpful nature of the apparition. “I do tend to believe most of the ghost stories related to Flight 401 because they seem very simple and innocent,” Sprague says. “These aren’t evil spirits trying to torment passengers or witnesses. They are merely trying to find any way to connect or communicate with us through the only things) they have in common with us — the stories they left behind.”

In early 1973, the captain on an Eastern Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Miami was asked to check on a passenger in first class. The passenger in question was another Eastern pilot — apparently “deadheading,” or flying home off the clock — who wasn’t listed on the flight manifest. The man, dressed in full captain’s uniform, hadn’t responded to the questions of the senior flight attendant. He was just staring straight ahead, as if in a daze. When the captain approached the passenger, he exclaimed, “My God — it’s Bob Loft.”

It should have been a welcome meeting between old colleagues. There was just one problem: Bob Loft had been dead for months.

Over the next year and a half, numerous Eastern employees reported seeing the ghosts of Repo and Loft on other Eastern flights. Flight attendants claimed to have seen Repo’s reflection in an oven door in the galley. An attendant on another New York-Miami flight opened an overhead bin to see Loft’s face staring back at her. An entire Eastern cockpit crew saw Repo sitting among them on another flight — they claimed the dead man warned them about a faulty electrical circuit, which was found and repaired. Even an Eastern vice president saw Loft on a plane preparing to take off from JFK.

Eastern employees who reported sightings to supervisors were typically referred to the company shrink. Eventually, the tales became so persistent and prevalent that Eastern management allegedly warned its employees that they would be fired if caught disseminating the ghost stories.

Meanwhile, logbooks from nearly all the flights on which the sightings were reported began to disappear. This is significant because Eastern flight crews were trained to note any and all onboard incidents in the flight log, no matter how small or questionable.

At some point, it emerged that Eastern had reportedly salvaged parts from Flight 401. Many of those parts were fitted onto aircraft 318, another L-1011 in Eastern’s fleet. Coincidentally — or maybe not — most of the ghost sightings occurred on aircraft 318.

The idea that departed souls might be able to retain some relationship with inanimate objects — like salvaged airplane parts — is known as psychometry. “I do believe in psychometry to an extent,” Ryan Sprague says. “I have several colleagues who claim [to have] haunted artifacts. I have personally witnessed unexplained phenomena occur in the vicinity of several of these items. While there’s certainly no way I can verify the authenticity of these items, the stories behind them or the phenomena that seem to be connected to them, I do think that certain energies can attach themselves to inanimate objects. When it comes to the salvaged parts from Flight 401, I could definitely understand some sort of residual energy being left behind.”

Regardless of Eastern’s official position on the who survived s, all parts salvaged from Flight 401 were eventually removed from other aircraft.

HAUNTED SKIES: The Ghostly Tale of Flight 401.  

The Restless Spirits of Flight 401

One of the most famous and well documented modern day hauntings was that of the restless spirits of Flight 401. Flight 401 was an Eastern Air Lines flight that was regularly scheduled to fly from the JFK Airport in Queens, New York, to Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida. However, on December 29th, 1972, Flight 401 would go from being a routine daily flight to one of tragedy.

On this day, the flight was operated using a four-month old L-1011 jumbo jet. The flights pilot was Captain “Bob” Loft, the First Officer was Albert Stockstill, and the Second Officer was “Don” Repo. There were 176 passengers on board. When the flight began nearing its destination, Captain Loft and his crew were carrying out routine landing procedures when Stockstill noticed that the landing gear light,  which told the crew that the nose gear was properly locked in the down position, did not light up. After failing to get the light to illuminate, Loft had the airport give the plane permission to enter a holding pattern instead of landing right away. While in the holding pattern, the crew began measures to confirm that the landing gear was indeed down, and the jet was put on autopilot. At first everything was fine as the plane reached its assigned altitude of 2,000 feet. However, in the next two minutes the plane dropped 100ft, flew level for two minutes, and then began to descend at a pace so gradual that it could not be perceived by the crew. Within the next minute the plane lost another 250ft, and a few minutes after that reached only half of what the assigned altitude was supposed to be. At this point the Captain and crew noticed that something was going wrong with the altitude. However, it was too late. Ten seconds after this realization the plane crashed into the Everglades. The Captain and his officers died, along with 10 flight attendants and 97 of the passengers.

Months later, sections of Flight 401 were recycled to be used on other aircrafts. Soon after the parts were effectively disseminated among the fleet, paranormal reports began to surface. Many senior airline personnel on the planes that contained salvaged parts from Flight 401 began seeing the deceased captain and his officers. Crew members, flight attendants, and passengers would often see the silent figure of a “drawn and ill-looking man” wearing an Eastern Airlines uniform. When approached the man would disappear. This mysterious entity was identified by several of those who had witnessed his presence to be non-other than the captain, Bob Loft.

Although Captain Bob Loft would often be unresponsive, there were several incidents where people had full on conversations with the apparition. One of these incidents occurred to one of the vice presidents of the airline who was about to embark on flight to Miami from the JFK airport. While in the airport, the vice president saw a man in uniform standing near the terminal entrance. Assuming that this man was the captain of the flight, the VP began to speak to the him. However, mid conversation he realized that the man he was speaking to was in fact the deceased Bob Loft. As soon as he had this realization, the mysterious spirit vanished. Another incident involved two flight attendants and a flight captain. They were having a conversation with Bob Loft in the plane’s cockpit when he suddenly vanished. The captain and flight attendants were so shaken up after the encounter that the flight had to be canceled before take-off.

Captain Bob Loft was not the only crew member of that fatal flight to continue hanging around after death. Don Repo was also seen on numerous occasions. Unlike Bob Loft, Repo was a helpful spirit who seemed to be looking out for Eastern Airline flights safety. One time, a flight engineer was carrying out a normal pre-flight inspection when he felt another presence looming over him. When the engineer turned to see who had joined him, he was shocked to see that it was Don Repo. Repo reportedly told him “You don’t need to worry about the pre-flight; I’ve already done it.” He then walked away and disappeared. At another time, a flight attendant noticed that a flight engineer was repairing a galley oven. Later on the flight attendant went to thank his colleague for doing the repair only to find out that the colleague had in fact not done the repair, and that the repair was still scheduled to be completed. Interestingly, it was later discovered that the galley oven had been salvaged from Flight 401.

As reports continued to occur, airline authorities refused to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts from Flight 401. Instead they recommended that anyone who had a “paranormal” experience seek some of the free psychiatric services being offered by the airline. Although the authorities adamantly refused to discuss anything ghost related, Eastern Airlines began to quietly remove all of the salvaged parts of Flight 401 from their fleet. Ever since the parts were removed all sightings have ceased.

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