Eastern Arlines Flight 401
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On the moonless night of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Airlines L-1011 Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades while attempting to land at Miami International Airport. There were 101 fatalities. It was the first crash of a "jumbo jet." The flight had been normal until the final approach into Miami. When co-pilot Bert Stockstill had looked at the landing gear indicator, the green light that identifies that the gear is properly locked in the 'down' position didn't illuminate. This failure has two possible explanations: either the gear wasn't down, or the light wasn't working. The pilots recycled the gear. When the light still did not come on, they aborted the landing to examine the situation. The tower instructed the L-1011 to pull out of its decent, climb to two thousand feet, and then make a U-turn and flight west over the darkness of the Everglades.
The cockpit crew removed the light assembly and the flight engineer was dispatched into the hell hole to visually check if the gear was down. Fifty seconds after reaching their assigned altitude and when the plane was halfway through its U-turn, the captain, Robert Loft, instructed Stockstill to put the L-1011 on autopilot. For the next eighty seconds the plane maintained level flight. Then it dropped one hundred feet, 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. In the next seventy seconds, the plane lost only 250 feet, but this was enough to trigger the altitude warning C-note chime located under the engineer's work station. The engineer, Don Repo, had gone below, and there was no indication by the pilot's voices that they heard the chime. In another fifty seconds, the plane was at half its assigned altitude. The plane's parabola was like that of a long line drive which finally expends its force and drops in an increasingly steep dive. At the moment when Stockstill's radio altimeter beeped the plane was passing through one hundred and one feet, the plane was dropping at fifty feet per second. The cockpit crew heard the warning, but it was too late.
For reasons unknown, the autopilot had become disengaged. Investigators believe it was accidentally turned off when the captain leaned against the steering column while turning to speak to the flight engineer.
The NTSB report cited the cause of the crash as pilot error, specifically: "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. 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." One hundred and three people died. The fifteen million dollar aircraft was destroyed. And it al began with two burned out light bulbs with a replacement value of twelve dollars.
The landing gear was found to be in the down and locked position.