Flight 401: Ghosts on a Plane

Imagine this: you’re a flight attendant going about your business on a plane when you open an overhead locker and see the face of a deceased colleague staring back at you. Creepy, eh? What’s he doing stuffed in there with all the bags and suitcases? Would you ever open anything ever again?

This is a detail that’s really stuck with me while reading about Flight 401 and it will probably be at the back of my mind the next time I fly somewhere, but so will most of the details about this case as anything involving plane crashes is always a cause for concern. Yes, it’s another story about planes, but this one has a ghostly twist.

The Frustrating Circumstances Surrounding the Crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401

On December 29, 1972, an almost brand new, super fancy Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar was flying from New York to Miami when a problem with the landing gear caused it to abort a landing approach and circle round the Everglades until the problem was sorted out. After circling for a little while, the plane started descending and eventually crashed into the swamplands. There were 176 people on board Flight 401, with 101 dying immediately or shortly after due to their injuries and 75 people managing to survive. We’ll go into the circumstances of the crash as, quite frankly, it’s pretty interesting, albeit very frustrating as it’s clear that this particular crash was definitely avoidable.

Heading up the crew was Captain Bob Loft. He was a seasoned pilot, well known and liked by his colleagues at the airline. Helping him out on the flight were First Officer Albert Stockstill and Flight Engineer Don Repo. Also hitching a ride to Miami but officially off-duty was Technical Officer Angelo Donadeo. Between them, these men had over 50,000 hours of flying time experience so you’d think the plane would be in good hands. Well, you’d be wrong.

As mentioned, the plane they were flying was a new addition to the fleet, a wide-body trijet airliner that was advertised as “The plane that pampers people.” It had more spaced out seating, a galley below the main level and even bragged that “suits can be hung in centre-divider compartments” which was more of a concern in the 70s than it is now with people traveling in their pajamas and what-not. Anyway, it should be noted that even with all those many thousands of hours clocked by the flight crew, this plane had only been introduced in August that year so Captain Bob Loft had less than 300 hours of experience with the Lockheed L-1011.

Stockstill barely had any more and Repo only had 53 hours of hands-on flying time in the aircraft. While all the previous flying experience would make the transition to a new plane easy, this particular model had different autopilot features than earlier planes, some of which were confusing enough that pilots had been instructed to either have the autopilot fully on or to just turn it off.

So as Flight 401 was cruising towards Miami, the Captain lowered the landing gear but the light to show that it was down and locked into position did not illuminate. This was not a major worry for Captain Loft. He retracted the gear and lowered it again but still the light didn’t come on.

To be on the safe side, the crew informed the control tower that they were having issues confirming the nose gear was down so the controller told them to climb back up to 2000 feet and circle around. Coincidentally, there was another plane approaching the airport with a similarly reported issue with its landing gear and preparations were being made for an emergency landing, so not a huge amount of attention was paid to Flight 401.

As they flew out of the way and started climbing to 2000 feet, Don Repo decided to check to see if the problem was actually with the light itself and not the landing gear. He tested the control panel lights and sure enough, the square button that was supposed to light up when the landing gear was locked remained dark. Repo then tried to get the light out of the panel and the whole situation bothered the crew enough that Captain Loft told Stockstill, who was actually flying the plane at the time but was nearest to the light, to put the plane on autopilot and try to see if he could pull the fixture out. During this time, the flight headed away from Miami and towards the Everglades to go into its holding pattern.

Eventually, Stockstill managed to pull the light out of the panel but no-one replaced the bulb or anything, they just tried to jam it back in. There was a trick to it though, which Stockstill evidently wasn’t aware of as he managed to get it stuck in an incorrect position. During this farcical interlude, Captain Loft finally asked Repo to go and actually look with his eyes to see if the landing gear was down.

It was around this time that it’s believed the Captain accidentally nudged the control column and inadvertently changed the autopilot setting. Repo descended into the belly of the plane through what’s known as the “hell hole,” to check if he could see a red line showing that the landing gear was indeed locked.

While he was down there, the faffing with the lightbulb continued. Loft clearly didn’t want to risk damaging the new plane by landing with faulty gear when it could be easily checked if it was locked in place or not. In the transcript from the cockpit voice recorders, there was much swearing about the stupid lightbulb with Loft saying: “to hell with this! Go down and see if it’s lined up…that’s all we care. Fuck around with that goddamned twenty-cent piece of light equipment we got on this bastard!”

Stockstill then said: “I don’t know what the hell is holding that son of a bitch in. Always something — we could have made schedule.”

Just after this, a one-second chime sounded which was to alert the crew that their altitude had changed. No-one appears to have heard it. The autopilot had descended the aircraft by more than 250 feet past the 2000 feet setting. And it was still going down.

A little after this, Repo pops back up saying that he couldn’t see anything down in the hell hole because it was too dark. Loft turned on a light and Repo went back to the hatch with off-duty Angelo Donadeo coming to lend him a hand. According to Donadeo, Stockstill and Loft were both still trying to pull this light fixture out again, and Stockstill was bracing his other hand on the control column.

At this point, the controller at Miami noticed that Flight 401 was showing as 900 feet altitude but apparently it was common for incorrect readings to show for a few sweeps of the radar before they glitched back to the correct ones. So comforting to know. He contacted the plane to check on it but didn’t ask anything specific, just said “How are things coming along out there?” Even doing this was apparently above and beyond the call of duty as they were primarily concerned with aircraft’s locations in relation to other aircraft, not how high one plane was flying out in the boondocks.

If he had just mentioned their altitude, though, maybe someone would have looked and seen they were way too low. But no-one did.

Loft said that they were going to turn and make their approach now and shortly after this, Stockstill finally noticed that their altitude was way off what they thought it was. The last recording from the cockpit went like this:

Stockstill: We did something to the altitude.

Loft: What?

Stockstill: We’re still at two thousand feet, right?

Loft: Hey, what’s happening here?

Less than 10 seconds later, the plane crashed into the Everglades at 227 miles per hour. It traveled over a third of a mile before finally coming to rest, in a myriad of chunks and pieces. Some people died in the crash, others were drowned in the marsh and many suffered burns from the jet fuel. There was also harmful bacteria in the swamps with some people eventually dying of “gas gangrene” and others having to have limbs amputated.

While there were a couple of people in the vicinity who started to help rescue people, the scene was over 13 km or 8 miles from a road so large scale rescue efforts took a bit of time to get there. Incredibly, 75 people survived. Unfortunately, Loft and Stockstill died at the scene with Repo dying later in hospital. The off-duty Angelo Donadeo survived.

For the record, the landing gear was in the correct fixed position and it was just the lightbulb that had burned out. It is such a waste that while four people were messing around with a small light fixture, nobody was actually flying the plane. That other plane that was also having issues with its nose gear ended up landing without incident. It was also found later that Captain Bob Loft had an undiagnosed brain tumour that could have given him issues with his vision but this was apparently not relevant to the crash circumstance so maybe it hadn’t begun to affect him yet.

At the time, this was the largest death toll involving a single aircraft in the United States which obviously made people pretty nervous about this type of plane going forward. It could have been worse, however. The softer, marshy terrain helped absorb some of the plane’s landing impact and the newer, stronger passenger seats no doubt saved a few lives. Also, there were at least 60 people that didn’t show up for the flight for whatever reason, meaning the aircraft was significantly under capacity.

The Spooky Part

Here’s where the creepy start of this story comes back in. After the crash, people, usually other pilots and flight crew, started reporting odd encounters aboard other Lockheed Tristar planes. The vice president of Eastern Airlines was on board a flight from New York when he got chatting to the pilot but realized later that the plane was, in fact, being flown by someone completely different and the pilot he had seen had disappeared. The man he saw had been Captain Bob Loft.

On a flight to Mexico City, a flight attendant was startled to see the face of the deceased Don Repo looking at her from the reflection in an oven door. After she gathered some colleagues to confirm that what she was seeing was actually there, Repo warned them about a fire on the plane. When they landed, it was found that of the three engines, one needed immediate replacement. The plane was flown back for repairs with just a crew on board but another engine did indeed catch fire, meaning the pilot had to land with only one working engine, which he managed to do.

Then comes the incident of the flight attendant opening an overhead locker and seeing Don Repo’s face staring back at her. There are many other stories of people, usually crew, seeing Don Repo or Captain Loft hanging about on other Lockheed Tristars, usually in the galley, or near the cockpit. The spectre of Captain Loft was always dressed in his pilot uniform and would be sitting or standing, chatting to people before eventually disappearing. Repo would apparently give helpful tips about potential issues with the plane, all of which ended up panning out.

As the sightings went on, it appeared that there was actually a common reason for the ghostly appearances. The Lockheed L-1011 was almost brand new and after the crash, any salvageable components had been recovered from the crash site and fitted into other aircraft. These included an oven from Flight 401’s swish below-deck galley and also the elevator between the levels.

Eventually though, Eastern Airlines got wind of all these ghost stories circulating around and decided to put a stop to them. Crew and employees were warned that anyone making reference to the incidents in the flight logs would be subject to disciplinary action. Any previous mentions were either removed from the existing flight logs or the logs were just replaced with blank versions.

This tactic was successful up to a point but it wasn’t until the recovered parts were actually removed from the other aircraft that the sightings finally stopped.

In 1976, however, John G. Fuller published The Ghost of Flight 401 which brought together all these spooky sightings and accused Eastern Airlines of trying to hush their employees up. While the airline did consider legal action against Fuller, they ultimately decided not to, fearing that it would just bring more eyes to the whole situation. In 1978, a movie based on the book was released, also called The Ghost of Flight 401. It’s currently 5.8 on IMDb but it has Kim Basinger in it, playing someone called “Prissy Frasier.”

Decoding the Unknown

There were two parts to this story, the super frustrating crash part and the spooky ghost part. One of them was 100% true. Unfortunately the plane crash part was horribly true but did lead to some better safety practices within avionics such as much better processes within the cockpit when problem solving, mandatory safety harnesses for crew jump seats and making flashlights part of the standard crew safety equipment as these were not fitted to lifejackets at the time. And when Flight 401 landed in the dark in the middle of an Everglades swamp, some extra lights to locate people might have saved more lives.

Anyway, back to all the hauntings. It kind of makes sense that parts from the crashed plane fitted into others would hold on to the spiritual energy from the disaster and that’s why sightings of Repo and Loft were on planes with parts from Flight 401. But when you actually look into it, it makes no sense at all because none of the parts of the crashed plane were re-used in other planes.

Flight 401 was largely obliterated, with the debris spreading out over a large area and nothing like an oven or something like an elevator was salvageable. And can you imagine the recovery team picking through the nightmare scene and being like “oh, we’ve got an oven that looks good over here, just a few dents in it. Stick it in the truck and we’ll re-use that, we will. Imagine the savings!”

Seems unlikely. Plus the Tristar was already being rolled out across the airline so they weren’t likely to save an oven from a crashed first gen wide-body jet to put into their next version.

So that bit of the ghost story is false. The rest can be dumped on in one fell swoop by pointing out that none of these stories were circulating around the airline prior to the publication of Fuller’s book in 1976, four years after the crash. While he stated that all the stories had been told to him personally, he had of course either changed people’s names or left them vague or anonymous to protect them from retribution from the airline. So there’s no real way to verify any of the claims of ghost sightings in his book. And the airline did actually try to do it. Remember how they were thinking of suing Fuller or his publisher but didn’t? It wasn’t because they were scared to bring this to the public’s attention, it was because they didn’t want to give him any more publicity. With the spin-off film coming out too, the spooky stories were just really starting to piss the management off. His claims that they bullied and harassed staff to keep quiet about their supernatural encounters were also the main reason the airline considered legal action.

In another book about Eastern Airlines that was published in 1980, called From the Captain to the Colonel by Robert Serling, an Eastern Airlines employee said “We spent weeks trying to locate anyone who claimed to have seen a ghost and couldn’t find one person.” So, could Fuller’s claims in the book have been made up? It seems so. Fuller published quite a few other books, including The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer, Incident at Exeter: Unidentified Flying Objects Over America Now and The Ghost of 29 Megacycles: A New Breakthrough in Life After Death? so this sort of tale seems right up his alley.

There doesn’t seem to be much connecting his book to any sort of real event that happened in the aftermath of the plane crash. No other documented proof of the ghost sightings appears before his book came out and attempts by the airline to investigate the stories came to nothing. No parts of Flight 401 were re-used and even if they were, they were not then subsequently removed from planes to exorcize Repo and Loft. And why would you want to, anyway?

They weren’t malevolent ghouls, they were described as being helpful in pointing out problems with the plane or just shooting the breeze with other people. Who would really complain about that?

The only tenuous connection that exists is related to the flight to Mexico City where the engines burned out. That part was true but the flight attendant seeing Don Repo’s face in an oven door was not. The pilot of that plane is documented in a journal of the Flight Safety Foundation a few weeks after his experience.

When asked about how it was to land the Tristar with only one engine, he said “Scary. For a minute I thought Repo’s ghost was on the plane.” This is literally the only reference to a ghost on a plane before Fuller’s book was published and it’s not like he’s admitting to seeing the ghost of the dead flight engineer.

He was throwing back to the still recent crash in a light-hearted manner as he was also recorded as having said it with a laugh. So, maybe not the most tactful of comments but not really concrete evidence for Don Repo to be haunting other Tristars. Seems to have been enough for Fuller, though!

Final Thoughts

Thankfully, the haunted Lockheed Tristars seem to be nothing more than an urban legend started by a writer with a supernatural leaning and perpetuated by a popular TV movie. The crash of Flight 401 should never have happened but at least there were a significant number of survivors and changes were put in place to stop situations like this where all the crew were distracted at the same time.

I’ll leave the last word to Colonel Frank Borman who was CEO of Eastern Airlines at the time of the crash. He was also a former Apollo astronaut. When asked about the whole situation regarding what was in Fuller’s book, Borman said “The one accurate quote in the book was made by Jim Ashlock when he called the whole story ‘a bunch of crap.’”

So there you go. There’s enough to worry about when flying through the air without having the ghosts of a dead cockpit crew jumpscaring us from the luggage rack.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 401?

On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades due to a problem with the landing gear and crew distraction. Out of 176 people on board, 101 died immediately or shortly after, and 75 survived.

Who were the key crew members on Flight 401?

The key crew members were Captain Bob Loft, First Officer Albert Stockstill, Flight Engineer Don Repo, and off-duty Technical Officer Angelo Donadeo.

What was the cause of the crash?

The crash was caused by the crew’s distraction while trying to fix a faulty landing gear light, leading to an unintentional descent and subsequent crash into the Everglades.

What were some of the safety changes implemented after the crash?

Safety changes included better cockpit problem-solving processes, mandatory safety harnesses for crew jump seats, and making flashlights part of the standard crew safety equipment.

What is the story behind the ghost sightings on other Lockheed Tristars?

After the crash, there were reports of ghostly sightings of Captain Bob Loft and Flight Engineer Don Repo on other Lockheed Tristars. These sightings were often attributed to parts from Flight 401 being reused in other aircraft.

Were the ghost stories true?

The ghost stories were largely debunked. No parts from Flight 401 were reused in other aircraft, and the stories were likely fabricated by John G. Fuller in his book ‘The Ghost of Flight 401’.

What was the impact of the crash on Eastern Airlines?

The crash was the largest death toll involving a single aircraft in the United States at the time, leading to significant safety improvements and public concern about the Lockheed L-1011 aircraft.

What was the significance of the landing gear light issue?

The faulty landing gear light caused the crew to become distracted, leading to an unintentional descent and crash. The actual landing gear was correctly deployed, but the crew’s focus on the light led to the tragedy.

How did the rescue efforts proceed after the crash?

Rescue efforts were delayed due to the remote location of the crash site, which was over 13 km from a road. Some people in the vicinity started helping immediately, but large-scale rescue efforts took time to arrive.

What was the public’s reaction to the ghost stories?

The ghost stories gained significant attention, especially after the publication of John G. Fuller’s book and the subsequent movie. Eastern Airlines attempted to suppress the stories but ultimately decided against legal action to avoid further publicity.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Flight 401: Ghosts on a Plane
• Hero image source by Ant.tab / openverse, by-sa.