Hobbit
Senior Member
I am speaking, of course, of what I am bringing up right here in this post, and that would be the crash of Eastern Airlines flight 401 on December 29, 1972. If you listened to Neal Boortz today (Thursday), you're disqualified from entering, because I'm ripping this off from him.
The short of this story is that at night, on the above date, this plane, an L-1011 jumbo jet, was flying over the Everglades. As it approached the airport it was landing on, the pilot tried to lower the landing gear, but the light for the nose gear remained off. Well, the whole crew decided to check out this problem by opening the trap door and checking the landing gear from there to see if it was down and, if not, find out the problem. However, as they scrambled around, somebody bumped the controls, disengaging the autopilot, and since the whole crew was checking out the landing gear, nobobdy noticed the plane descending...except one of the passengers who saw a radio tower and thought they might be making an emergency landing elsewhere. Well, they finally got the trap door open, and the flight engineer saw the lights of the plane reflected off the water of the Everglades. They were about ten feet up. Before he could shout at the pilots, the plane crashed, full speed, into the water. Only 76 of the 176 passengers survived, though, scientifically, nobody should have. All that night and the next day, rescuers pulled the screaming survivors from the water while armed men in airboats patrolled for alligators (and shot several). The plane was surprisingly intact after the crash, and several pieces were sent back to the assembly line and used to build another, identical plane, which is rumored to be haunted.
Whoever first guesses why I brought this up and how it relates to today, 23 years later, gets a rep bump from me, which, as of this posting, is worth 14 points.
http://www.geocities.com/donuts13/
The short of this story is that at night, on the above date, this plane, an L-1011 jumbo jet, was flying over the Everglades. As it approached the airport it was landing on, the pilot tried to lower the landing gear, but the light for the nose gear remained off. Well, the whole crew decided to check out this problem by opening the trap door and checking the landing gear from there to see if it was down and, if not, find out the problem. However, as they scrambled around, somebody bumped the controls, disengaging the autopilot, and since the whole crew was checking out the landing gear, nobobdy noticed the plane descending...except one of the passengers who saw a radio tower and thought they might be making an emergency landing elsewhere. Well, they finally got the trap door open, and the flight engineer saw the lights of the plane reflected off the water of the Everglades. They were about ten feet up. Before he could shout at the pilots, the plane crashed, full speed, into the water. Only 76 of the 176 passengers survived, though, scientifically, nobody should have. All that night and the next day, rescuers pulled the screaming survivors from the water while armed men in airboats patrolled for alligators (and shot several). The plane was surprisingly intact after the crash, and several pieces were sent back to the assembly line and used to build another, identical plane, which is rumored to be haunted.
Whoever first guesses why I brought this up and how it relates to today, 23 years later, gets a rep bump from me, which, as of this posting, is worth 14 points.
http://www.geocities.com/donuts13/
