It would be hard to make up a plausible story like Ronald Infantino's -- too sad, too joyful. Bud's heroics were featured prominently a few days later in the Miami Herald. Photography courtesy Ron Infantino, A few minutes later Leonhards radio crackled. The rescuers are picking people up from the nose section of the plane first. The warden noted nothing of interest. Podcast transcript | Subscribe. So, being the thoughtful brother-in-law he was, unbeknownst to me he had collected some of the wreckage of Flight 401. Barbara Ann Saal. Talk to anyone about ghosts or hauntings, and invariably images of abandoned old houses with dilapidated features or conditions will spring to mind. Now it was her turn. Born in Seymour, Conn. on May 8, 1929, to Julius and Mary Kaslo Ulrich. The plane was dropping from the sky at a rate of 200 feet each minute. The court citing, among other reasons, that the claimants were found to be actors or participants in newsworthy stories or events, that the book a nonfictionalized account based on the authors own investigationfell under the legitimate public interest exception. Roberto Palma 6/10/27 By. He was one of those rare south Florida individuals who owned a ton of hunting rifles and lived for the deer hunting season so he could go out on his air boat and hunt scrawny deer in the Everglades. References: Judy Ellenberg 2/27/53 An Eastern representative told Serling that, while pondering whether to sue Fuller or his publisher: We spent weeks trying to locate anyone who claimed to have seen a ghost and couldn't find one person. The trip to Florida, by official accounts, was pleasantly routine. Then an alarm chimed, signaling a 250-foot drop. Loft and Repo have never been reported on the same flight, by the same witnesses, at the same time. Were not going to leave you.. A fireball rushed through the fuselage, and the plane began pinwheeling like a giant Ferris wheel spun loose from its mount. Flight crews and passengers on other similar aircraft in the Eastern Air Lines fleet came forward with stories of sightings of Bob Loft and Don Repo. Bud wants to. Four years after the crash, there was no such thing as convenient access to the photos for the average person. . The wheels were down, locked in position for landing, but the pilot wasn't sure about the forward wheel under the plane's nose. Evelyn De Salazar 11/6/08 Now take a sip. "He was naked. By that time, I had also earned a commercial pilot license with airplane single and multi-engine and instrument ratings. Sure enough, I recall that the initial restricted area was posted in a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) and set out a no-fly zone that had a one mile radius from the crash site up to 2,000 feet above mean sea level. Combined with numerous anonymous witnesses and countless tales, the rumors spread throughout the aviation community. His right arm was badly hurt. Dennis Gordon 12/9/32 Water saturated by jet fuel filled his boots, burning his legs. I think all the survivors had been rescued by that time and taken to hospitals, but there were a lot of bodies still at the crash site. 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. It was one of the great ghost stories of the 1970s. And before I had time to even let off the throttle or do anything else, I ran over those two people, who I knew were both dead. You can see the brand name on the oven instruction plate. The government considered him totally disabled. "I could get it running," he says, fighting for breath. Forty-five years ago, when Officer Gray Leonhard of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission began a solo night patrol in the Everglades, he was on the lookout for poachers, drug smugglers and maybe even a bullet-riddled corpse. The guy laughed and said "Scary. The Ghost of Flight 401 (TV 1978) - YouTube | That's why Hansel wanted me to fly; it would be my license that got revoked if we got caught, not his! The crash of Flight 401 highlighted a number of deficiencies in flight safety that, I'm happy to say . I have chosen to list him as a survivor as he was alive at the time of the NTSB hearings. This show is made possible by financial support from listeners like you. According to the National Transportation Safety Board ( NTSB ), the main fuselage broke into four main sections and many other smaller pieces on impact. That was the first time I had heard of the crash. But we knew our job was to rescue the survivors first. The jet actually began losing altitude, so gradually that no one noticed until the very end. The pair conversed briefly before Loft faded from sight. There was a lot of activity on the ground, but we couldn't see much detail from 3,000 feet. December 29, 2022, 8:23 PM. The Ghost of Flight 401 was not much of a departure for him. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. Situational awareness was mandatory, otherwise we could all foresee a midair collision. All content is Skeptoid Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It's a swamp, a flat swamp. Ron Infantino and his late wife, Lilly, on their wedding day; Photography courtesy Ron Infantino. Newsroom Ready: Canadian officials, families honour Flight PS752 victims on third anniversary Grieving friends and relatives of victims killed during the downing of Flight PS752 called for justice and accountability from the Iranian regime as Canadians from coast to coast marked three years since the country's military shot the plane down. She was so worried about his appearance that she summoned an attendant to investigate further. They had drowned because their seats landed with their heads tilted down into the swamp water. Bob Loft appeared before the Vice President of Eastern Air Lines in First Class. 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. The silence was broken only by the intermittent croaking of bullfrogs and the occasional rustle of tall reeds as an unseen creature passed through them. Beverly Raposa doesn't mind flying. Inside the planes cockpit, the crew was trying to slide in a replacement bulb, a roughly two-square-inch all-in-one light assembly unit covered by a translucent green plastic lens, valued at $12 altogether. His last complete thought before losing consciousness was, This is going to be one hell of a rough landing., Beverly Raposa with her Eastern Airlines stewardess class in the 60s; Photography courtesy Ron Infantino. The wreckage of Eastern Air Lines flight 401 lies in the Florida Everglades after the crash. Books and TV movies frightened audiences, and this ghost story that had it all became a permanent fixture in great American tales of the paranormal. 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. The plane descended out of the sky as pilots were distracted over a landing gear warning light. At 11:32, they aborted the landing, climbed to 2,000 feet and swung west over the Everglades to work out the problem. Pilots and flight attendants frequently saw Don Repo after that, and always he gave them some valuable maintenance note about the aircraft. Robert A. Loft, then 55 years old, with 30 years experience and 29,700 flight hours under his belt, attempted to lower the landing gear. About a year after the crash of Flight 401, she told me that one of the flight attendants who had survived the crash had come back to work at Eastern, but was assigned to the executive secretarial pool while she recovered from her physical injuries and tried to cope with her mental anguish. It is now known that "Mrs. McAvoy" was Donna Smith, Thomas McAvoy's traveling companion. Robert Serling's 1980 book From the Captain to the Colonel tells the complete history of Eastern Airlines, from 1935 when it was headed by World War I ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, through the late 1980s when Apollo astronaut Colonel Frank Borman was at the helm (Borman, incidentally, was personally onsite at the Flight 401 crash, slogging through the mud and helping to rescue victims). It was more accurately a "tie-down"club; the members owned their aircraft and joined the club to be able to tie-down their aircraft at reasonable costs and have access to a ramp area where they could perform routine maintenance on their planes. 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. Miguel Junco, being carried into a hospital by an attendant. "Nobody paid him to go out there and try to rescue people," says Ken Pine, who recently fixed Bud's roof. For those who haven't seen the images: In her initial report from the crash site a large Ukrainian wheat field "dotted with purple flowers and Queen Anne's lace" the New York Times . In the cockpit, the first of six radio altimeter warnings began, signaling an impending crash. The control tower at Opa locka shut down at 11pm each evening back then so the L1011 had to be in contact with Miami Approach Control, since we assumed it was ultimately being vectored for an approach to MIA. His book was later adapted into a made-for-tv movie starring William Shatner as an NTSB investigator. Ghosts of Flight 401 - 3 | His left knee was dislocated, wrenched sideways at a vicious right angle. 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. He saw tangled metal and smelled aviation fuel. With the $250,000 legal settlement, Micale thought he had it made. Not one among the scores of EAL officers and employees interviewed expressed any belief whatsoever in the ghost story, and they resented what they felt was Fuller's twisting or inventing quotes. But fortunately, it is not the only source available to us. According to my late mother, she wanted to get back to flying, but she was petrified every time she heard jet noise. A pale glow lightened the sky above Miami more than 40 miles away. Lloyd Irving Bearman 1/16/23 There were also other artifacts such as yellow airline life preservers and panes of plastic passenger windows. ", PHOTO of Mercy Ruiz and her Samsonite suitcase in May 2009. She looked into the distance, saw the dim lights of Miami framed against a coal-black horizon and noticed how far away it was. The memories don't. 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. 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