Flight 980: The Mystery of the Missing Blackbox

This one is a pretty good mystery as there are a few different things going on that all end up leading to big, fat question marks. It also feels like one of those things that can actually be solved although there is, of course, the shadow of a conspiracy theory which would mean never finding out what really happened. This story involves a plane crash where the crash itself is a mystery, suspiciously stymied recovery expeditions, no bodies and a missing black box that could answer the questions about the entire event.

In fact, pretty much the only things definitively recovered from the crash site are a load of smuggled caiman skins. Yes, the smaller alligator-related thing.

Let’s explore all the unknowns surrounding Eastern Airlines Flight 980. And boy, are there some unknowns going on here.

The Crash

On New Year’s Day, 1985, Eastern Airlines flight 980 was coming in for a landing at El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Bolivia. El Alto is one of the highest airports in the world so it’s got an extra long runway to account for the extra speed a plane has to carry to successfully land at a higher altitude than normal. The pilot for Flight 980 was Larry Campbell but he was inexperienced with landing at altitude, this being only his second time flying into El Alto.

With about 10 minutes until he anticipated landing, the pilot was cleared to descend to 18,000 feet. What happened next has never been fully explained but the end result was that the Boeing 727 flew straight into the back side of Mount Illimani, shattering the plane and killing everyone on board. While the plane could hold over 100 passengers when full, there were only 19 passengers and 10 crew on Flight 980’s last journey.

While survivors were never really anticipated, the search and recovery missions carried out in the wake of the crash ranged from slightly suspicious to almost farcical. The Bolivian airforce managed to find the main crash site from the air the day following the incident but a team couldn’t make it up the mountain due to bad weather and avalanches which, yes, seems like a valid reason to wait for a while.

As it was a US plane that went down, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) assembled a team to investigate the accident and to track down the infamous “black boxes.” These are the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, both of which are extremely useful, if not essential, in working out why and how the plane managed to crash into the mountain. Unfortunately, none of the climbers or investigators rapidly assembled by the NTSB managed to get acclimated to the high altitude in Bolivia and were too ill to make the climb. ALPA—or the Airline Pilots Association—also tried to send a team up the mountain but were unable to for the same reasons—altitude sickness and just a general lack of preparedness.

The US then asked neighbouring Peru if they could borrow a high altitude helicopter to fly up Mount Illimani but because of pettiness and trying to avoid looking inadequate, Bolivia got the hump and wouldn’t allow the helicopter in. Eventually though, it got over itself and allowed permission for the helicopter to fly up to the crash site. In a scheme that seems like something Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond would do, ALPA chairman Bud Leppard decided he’d jump out of the helicopter at 21,000 feet and then ski back down the mountain. I don’t really know what he hoped to achieve by this, maybe the altitude sickness was affecting his critical thinking.

The helicopter can’t get too near the mountain or it would crash so he’s got a high possibility of injuring himself when jumping out. If he managed to find the recorders, how was he proposing to get them down the mountain? They weigh around 10 pounds or 4.5 kilograms today so presumably would have been bulkier in the mid 1980s. He might have needed tools to retrieve them and secure them to himself and at altitude that’s a lot of work.

The skiing down idea was stupid as the terrain was rocky, the weather had been bad and avalanches had stopped the Bolivians sending anyone up earlier. Maybe a mid-life crisis was the real inspiration here. Luckily Leppard’s foolhardy stunt was put to bed when it was discovered that the high altitude helicopter wasn’t high altitude enough and wouldn’t be able to hover in the thin air at 21,000 feet.

Another helicopter was requested for the mission from US-based Sikorsky Aircraft which is now a part of Lockheed Martin. This experimental high altitude helicopter was sent to Bolivia in pieces to be assembled there but, you guessed it, the engineers sent to put it together were too altitude sick to do anything for several days. Of course altitude sickness is a real thing and it affects everyone differently but man, these Americans are really taking this lack of oxygen hard.

Anyway, helicopter finally working, they did manage to fly it up Mount Illimani but they’d missed their window and the weather was now too bad to let anyone out. The helicopter was only on loan for about a week so that was the end of that attempt.

By this point, you might be thinking—“what the heck? Just get some Bolivian climbers to go up there again! They’re already acclimated and ready to go!” Well, in actual fact, during all these false starts, someone had quietly made it up to the crash site.

A mere 2 days after Flight 980 had crashed, Bernardo Guarachi who was, yes, a Bolivian climber, made it up to the wreck site. It was unclear at the time on whose behalf he made the hike, lending more credence to the increasing cries of a cover up. His report of what he discovered was also hushed up, he later stated that officials had threatened him, and he wasn’t mentioned in Bolivia’s official report of the accident.

There are no pictures of the site from his trek, although that’s because he didn’t take any camera equipment as opposed to them being suppressed. Peter Frick-Wright, in a piece for OutsideOnline.com managed to catch up with Guarachi around 2016 and got more of a fuller picture from him. Frick-Wright also has a more immediate connection with the story which we’ll come to a bit later on.

What Guarachi did find in January 1985 was plane debris, open suitcases, lots of caiman skins, but no human bodies. And no flight recorders. Guarachi and the 2 other climbers with him couldn’t stay at the site for too long as they had no supplies and there was no way to drop any more seeing as how Bud Leppard was prevented from his Bond-style shenanigans, so they had to come down the next day.

This is where the military picked them up, interrogated and threatened them and made an official report stating that no bodies or blood had been found at the scene. Guarachi told Frick-Wright that he had seen blood at the site, he was just too afraid of the interrogators to disagree with their narrative.

So while this was a successful expedition in some respects, we still didn’t learn much from it as no flight recorders were found. A few subsequent treks have been made to the site, one which included the widow of William Kelly who had died on the flight. Judith Kelly did things the right way, taking her time to acclimate to the higher altitude before beginning her climb in July 1985. She took letters that she had written for her husband, as well as letters from other family members of the victims and buried them at the site.

By now, the remains of the plane had started descending the mountain of their own accord. Flight 980 hit near the top of the mountain and since then, pieces have been sliding down in snow and ice falls.

So as it stood until 2016, we were still none the wiser as to the circumstances surrounding the plane crash. The official report from the US side of things gave their verdict as “controlled flight into terrain” which tells us what happened—the plane flew into a mountain—but not why or how.

The 2016 Expedition

And what happened in 2016 then? Adventurous ex-soldier, Dan Futrell, found out about Flight 980 and its missing black box and decided to try and find it for himself. Along with his roommate, Isaac Stoner, the pair started training for the challenge by sleeping in special altitude tents and running up and down a lot of stairs.

Shortly before their expedition, word got out to Peter Frick-Wright, who I mentioned before, and he joined the party. Even with their hypoxic tent training, the climb was still arduous and hard but with a lucky break in the weather, the team made it to the crash site which was more exposed than it had ever been. Well, it wasn’t really the original crash site any more as everything had been falling down the mountain for 30 years but they had reached the debris field of Flight 980.

Thanks to a steep drop in the mountain, a lot of the plane’s debris is now almost 3,000 feet further down than a smaller field higher up.

Almost immediately they found a human femur which totally undermined the “no bodies” aspect of the story. Over the course of their first search they found another part of a leg bone and a piece of spine. In total, there were “six instances of human remains” according to Dan Futrell’s blog about their trip.

While that is proof that people died, it’s still not enough to account for 29 people. Futrell says that the area they searched was about 1 mile by 0.75 miles or 1.6 kilometres by 1.2 kilometres. They found many plane parts, shoes, clothes and lots and lots of caiman skins but not the black boxes they were after.

Even though they’re called “black boxes”, the flight recorders are usually housed in a bright orange case to make it easy to find them in situations such as this. Futrell and his team did find scraps of orange metal which they thought might be parts of the casing but these boxes are supposed to be almost indestructible so finding scraps and twisted bits of orange metal didn’t bode that well for finding anything usefully salvageable.

On the final day of their search, Isaac Stoner found some metal with wiring that had an abbreviation for “Cockpit Voice Recorder” on it. Finally! But that was it, there wasn’t anything else attached to it. Nearby, however, was some tape that they fervently hoped was part of the recording device.

Once they got home, they tried to send the samples of orange metal and the tape to the NTSB for analysis but, as per Peter Frick-Wright’s article, they had inadvertently “violated Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation”. The evidence should have remained in Bolivia, as that’s where the crash happened. After months of trying to contact anyone in Bolivia about this, Futrell finally got permission from Bolivian officials that the NTSB could investigate the pieces. And what were the results?

Well, as the title of this story may suggest, they were not what anyone was hoping for.

In February 2017, the NTSB released the findings of the fragments taken from the crash site. Here’s part of their report:

The materials provided to the NTSB consisted of several metal fragments, one damaged spool of magnetic tape and two additional off-spool sections of magnetic tape.

Examination of the materials revealed no identifiable specific serial numbers. One metal piece was identified as a cockpit voice recorder rack. Other metal pieces were consistent with parts related to the flight data recorder pressurized container assembly.

OK, so we finally have proof of part of a recorder! So what was on the tape, eh? Eh? Here’s what the NTSB found:

The magnetic tape on the spool was ¾-inch U-Matic video tape and when reviewed was found to contain an 18-minute recording of the ‘Trial by Treehouse’ episode of the television series ‘I Spy,’ dubbed in Spanish.

Oh. Well that’s disappointing. The episode does have an 8.2 rating on imdb.com though so at least it was a decent one. Presumably this was part of the in-flight entertainment and while he was obviously pretty gutted about it, Futrell seems optimistic on his blog that the correct tapes are still out there, probably close to where they were looking, just waiting to be found.

And now we’re a further few years on with not much more information than we had at the start, so let’s get into the questions and theories. There are lots.

Why Did the Plane Crash?

This is the biggie. How could a passenger plane that was supposedly on course for El Alto airport end up crashing into a mountain? There are a few factors that play into this but without the flight data recorders, we can’t know 100% what really happened.

We already know thanks to me mentioning altitude sickness about 100 times that the airport was way higher up than most other airports anywhere in the world. Pilots are supposed to wear oxygen masks on approach and all the way to the gate so they’re not affected by the change in altitude. The pilot on Flight 980 was making only his second landing at El Alto so did something go wrong with him?

Well, even if he became ill or something, there was another pilot right next to him and there was also a flight engineer hanging out in first class. If there had been any sign of an issue, he’d be the first one trying to help out although, interestingly, the Boeing 727 had a three-person cockpit, meaning that the engineer really should have been with the pilots during the flight.

At 8.38 pm Eastern time, the plane was in touch with ground control in La Paz and seemed on track, flying at 20,000 feet. They had been given the all-clear to descend to 18,000 feet but shortly after that the plane hit the mountain and communications went dead. It should be noted that there was no radar at El Alto airport and ground control couldn’t really help pilots all that much, as the equipment they did have wasn’t the best. Instead, the cockpit crew of the planes had to work out the navigation more or less for themselves.

The weather was bad which hardly helped matters, so are all these factors adding up to pilot error and a very unfortunate accident? Probably. The Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives states:

The crew deviated from the prescribed route apparently to avoid bad weather when, at an altitude of 19,600 feet, the aircraft struck the slope of Mt Nevado Illimani (6,400 meters high) located 43 km southeast from runway 28. The aircraft disintegrated on impact and all 29 occupants were killed.

The probable cause was given as: “Controlled flight into terrain after the crew failed to realize his altitude and path were incorrect while cruising in limited visibility due to the night and clouds up to 9,000 meters.”

There might have been technical problems going on inside the plane which added to their woes—again, without the data recorders, we can’t know for sure. There are other theories though, and it would be boring if it was an open and shut case.

Was it a Bomb?

A mid-air explosion which then launched the plane into the mountain might explain a few of the details of the case. In 2014, a former Eastern Airlines pilot, George Jehn, published a book called “Final Destination: Disaster”. Personally, I think he could have workshopped the title a bit more.

Anyway, Jehn creates the case for a bomb having been on board, pointing to how this would have depressurized the plane, either blowing apart the people inside or sucking their bodies out to land all over the place and quite a distance from where the plane eventually hit. If you follow this train of thought, it covers another point as well. Depending on where the bomb was, it may also have blown apart the casings for the flight recorders which, in the 80s, may not have been as robust as they are these days.

But why would anyone want to blow up a plane with only a few people on it?

There are actually a few reasons for thinking that the plane was taken out on purpose.

Who Was on Board?

I’ve mentioned that there were 19 passengers and 10 crew on the plane but it might be helpful to go into a bit more detail as to who these people were. Of the 29 people on board, there were 9 Koreans, 8 Americans, 7 Paraguayans and 5 Chileans. 5 of the Paraguayan passengers were from the Matalón family who had a very well known and successful business in home appliances.

One of the Americans was the aforementioned William Kelly whose widow hiked up to the crash site to pay her respects. He was the Director of the United States Peace Corps delegation to Paraguay at the time of the crash.

Another American who died was Marian Davis, notably the wife of the US Ambassador to Paraguay. The Ambassador himself was supposed to be on Flight 980 but had a life-saving last minute change of plans.

So yes, there were people on the flight or who were supposed to be on the flight, that could have been targets for assassination.

Let’s yoink another thread here and delve a bit deeper into Eastern Airlines itself. If you’re not that familiar with the name, it’s because it dissolved in 1991. The name has apparently been bought and re-launched in recent years but the iteration we’re talking about ceased operations over 20 years ago. It was a large and successful airline in its day but it seems that its success might have also come from other, much more shady dealings.

In 1985, the same year as the Flight 980 incident, US Customs busted Eastern Airlines after lots and lots of cocaine was found stuffed in suitcases flown from Colombia to Miami. They were fined $1.3 million which is over 3 million dollars today.

According to the New York Times in an article from September 27th 1986:

Another Federal official estimated that as much as 300 pounds of cocaine a week was brought into Miami in this manner over the three-year period and that the airport crews were paid as much as $250,000 to clear each shipment.

If that’s the case then the fine seems pretty paltry.

The year following the crash, 22 Eastern Airline workers were indicted on drug smuggling charges. This didn’t help Eastern’s business model which was already starting to flounder against new lower-cost airlines. Add in to that a whopping fine of $9.5 million for safety violations in 1987 (which is over $23 million today), and financially ruinous strikes in 1989 and you can see why this airline bit the dust.

So let’s look at this drugs angle. George Jehn’s book posits that Eastern Airlines was actually in cahoots with then US President, Ronald Reagan and secretly running drugs to finance the Iran-Contra affair. We’re not going to get into this but this was a political scandal in the mid to late 1980s involving the US and supposed illegal weapons trades with Iran in order to finance the rebel Contra group in Nicaragua. Yes, it’s complicated but Jehn’s basically saying that the US deliberately fudged the investigation into Flight 980 to hide evidence of the ties to Reagan and this Iran-Contra mess.

According to Jehn, this then led to Eastern’s ultimate demise. Is this a totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory? Yes, of course. But is it fun to speculate?

Yes, of course!

Let’s carry on with this drug smuggling thing!

Ok, if we’re still on this “deliberately destroyed” tack, let’s go back over what we know. There were high-ranking people on board this plane, some of whom would have had targets on their backs for political or financial reasons. I mean, out of 19 passengers, 5 were part of a rich and powerful family business empire, one was the Director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay, and the US Ambassador to Paraguay was supposed to be on there. I couldn’t find out anything about the Korean passengers who made up the majority of the list but even without taking them into account, there are a few high-profilers on the passenger list.

There was another incidence of a bomb taking out a passenger plane in order to assassinate a Colombian presidential candidate that happened just a few years later in 1989 and do you remember who was behind that? Only the “King of Cocaine” himself, Pablo flipping Escobar. Unfortunately for Escobar and everyone else on Avianca Flight 203, his intended target, César Gaviria, wasn’t even on the plane.

Is this a weird but noteworthy connection to Flight 980? I don’t think Escobar had any links with Paraguay so this is probably just stretching a tenuous coincidence. Also, no cocaine was found, or at least reported, in the wreckage of flight 980 although if it had burst open in the snow I guess you’d never know it was there.

Flight 980 wasn’t flying from Colombia either so we can probably discount involvement from Escobar or any other rival cartels. I just thought it was kind of fun to add in, being that we were just talking about drug smuggling and stuff.

What’s With All the Caiman Skins?

Yes, finally we get to the crux of the story, the reptile skins strewn all over Mount Illimani. This was the 80s where it was cool to wear crocodile skin clothes or whatever, so trade in this kind of thing meant the killing of animals on a massive scale. Unsurprisingly, this meant that trade was eventually restricted on reptile skins and that having a huge amount of caiman hides in the hold of Flight 980 was definitely illegal.

According to a blog post by Isaac Stoner, another member of the 2016 expedition to the crash site, pieces of this skin were literally everywhere. Before identifying the animal as probably a caiman, he wrote:

Pieces of snake/alligator/crocodile skins are scattered all over the mountain. In picking up a plane part for a closer look, often there would be a crocodile hide on or near the part. They are in such abundance that we actually became quite sick of them as we combed the field for the black box.

Stoner also theorized that the huge haul of contraband might have been a factor in why the investigations into the crash ended up being less than rigorous. He wrote:

…these illegal animal skins are part of a larger pattern of smuggling illegal goods on Eastern Airlines commercial flights. Someone in the organization was making money on these sketchy practices. If some of this money found its way into the right pockets, it would be easy to delay the appropriate investigational response until many feet of snow/ice covered the crash site.

Even more food for thought.

What the Heck Happened to the Black Box?

Shall we make our way back to the point of this story? To fully understand what happened in aircraft incidents, it’s important to get hold of what’s known as the “black box”. This is the flight data recorder that records everything that’s going on with the plane’s systems.

Since 1997, in the US at least, flight data recorders must record at least 88 different parameters including things like fuel flow, magnetic heading, airspeed and control wheel position. Also coming under the “black box” heading is the Cockpit Voice Recorder which, as the name suggests, picks up and records all conversation and noise inside the cockpit.

Due to the important nature of the recorders, they have “crash-survivable memory units” which are built to withstand crashes, pressure and extreme heat. Also, as we mentioned before, in order that they be located easily after an accident, they are painted bright orange and mounted on a bright orange base. They also have underwater location beacons in case of an incident over water.

In 1985, the black box would have been recording on magnetic tape rather than the solid state memory boards used nowadays. Also, even with its reputation as being able to survive a plane crash, there are instances of the flight data recorder and/or cockpit voice recorder being unusable in the aftermath of a crash.

It was on the Wikipedia page “List of unrecovered and unusable flight recorders” that Dan Futrell found out about the inaccessibility of Flight 980 and decided to try and find it. Looking at the list now, there are currently 59 entries from 1965 to the present day. In the majority of cases, the Flight Data Recorders have never been found but in a few one or both recorders have been destroyed or rendered unusable, generally in a post-crash fire. So what happened to the flight data recorder from Flight 980?

Again, several theories. The first, and most obvious, is that it was destroyed or at least badly damaged in the crash. Futrell and Stoner found parts of what was confirmed to be the outside of the black box, indicating that the outer case at least had been broken into many pieces. Was this by explosion or as a result of the crash?

We don’t know. The tape they found and brought back was not the correct size for the tape that would be used in the recorders so it’s indeed possible that the correct tape is still somewhere on Mount Illimani. Finding pieces of brown magnetic tape that could potentially have blown anywhere is a lot harder than looking for the bright orange of the flight data recorder but it’s definitely not impossible that the tape is still out there. Whether it’s usable if found is another question.

Another theory is that the first climber up the mountain, Bernardo Guarachi, got rid of the data recorders by throwing them off the mountain or something to aid in the cover-up of the situation. George Jehn comes back into play here, theorizing in his “Final Destination: Disaster” book that Guarachi was hired by the NTSB or Eastern Airlines themselves to get rid of the evidence so as not to expose Reagan’s drug running operation. In his Outside article, Peter Frick-Wright sums this up with: “It’s a convoluted plot, too far-fetched to take seriously, but seductive as hell to those looking to explain the inexplicable.”

I heard another theory from “The Shocking Details” podcast on this story that the design of the plane itself might be to blame. The Boeing 727 had 3 engines, all at the rear of the plane by the tail instead of under the wings, for example. The black box would likely have been mounted somewhere near the rear staircase meaning that if there was an explosion, pieces from all three engines could have destroyed it.

If the plane flew straight into the mountain, the data recorder would likely have been in the direct path of at least one engine and could have fallen into it or been smashed by the engine coming through the body of the plane. Basically, there are some good reasons for how this thing got so beaten up.

What Happened to the People?

No bodies were ever found by any of the parties venturing up Mount Illimani. What happened to all the people on the plane? Futrell and Stoner did find six small body parts which they buried and geo-tagged so “no bodies” isn’t really correct any more. If a bomb did cause the plane to go down, the lack of bodies here makes sense as they’d probably be ejected before the plane hit the mountain.

It is kind of weird that none have been found, especially as they would have been preserved in the ice and snow but that’s presuming that they would have been in one piece. There were only 29 people on the plane so could they all have been blown to smithereens in the crash? I suppose if an engine or two did come through the plane, there wouldn’t be much left of anyone to identify. While “no blood” has also always been part of this mystery, Bernardo Guarachi later confirmed to Peter Frick-Wright that there had been blood at the scene.

I guess not a lot though as no-one else really mentioned it.

Maybe, because they were looking for recognizable human bodies, everyone who made it up to the site overlooked the smaller pieces Futrell and Stoner later found. There would have been so much rubble and plane parts that something like a piece of a leg would easily go unnoticed and the weather at the time was bad with avalanches hampering the initial expeditions so it’s not unlikely that the human remains would have quickly been buried or covered in snow. The caiman skins were still everywhere, though, so you might have thought that some more obvious signs of bodies would have been visible.

The fact that Futrell and Stoner found anything seems to confirm that some people at least were still in the plane when it hit the mountain, maybe squashing my bomb theory after all. Which is kind of a shame as it tied a lot of things together for me!

Conclusions

Here we are at the end and what have we learned? From what the 2016 expedition found, it now seems likely that the plane, for whatever reason, flew into the mountain and disintegrated. The passengers suffered a similar fate with little to no trace left of them by the time anybody managed to get up to the wreck site. The black box was destroyed or damaged to such an extent that the tape inside came free of the casing.

Whether this tape is still on the mountain and is still usable is for hardier folk than me to find out but that’s what really holds the key to the whole incident.

Do we think there were nefarious things going on? The fact that Eastern Airlines was implicated in a smuggling racket and then went under a few years later definitely adds some interesting offshoots to the narrative, as well as there being several high profile passengers and a lot of contraband animal skins on the flight. People have been unimpressed with the NTSB’s report, saying that it didn’t investigate the incident fully or properly but I guess as we’ve found out, there isn’t that much you can do with limited communication reports, a difficult-to-reach crash location and no data recorder.

The main takeaway I have from researching this story is that as well as the human cost, a lot of caimans died for nothing and also, if you happen to be going up a mountain, you must always be sure to acclimate, acclimate, acclimate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 980?

On New Year’s Day, 1985, Eastern Airlines Flight 980 crashed into Mount Illimani while attempting to land at El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Bolivia. The plane, a Boeing 727, flew straight into the mountain, shattering the plane and killing all 29 people on board.

Why was the recovery of the black box from Flight 980 so challenging?

The recovery efforts were hampered by various factors, including altitude sickness affecting investigators, political tensions between Bolivia and Peru, and logistical issues with high-altitude helicopters. Additionally, the crash site was difficult to access due to bad weather and avalanches.

What was found at the crash site of Flight 980?

The primary items recovered from the crash site were smuggled caiman skins. Human remains were scarce, with only six small body parts found by Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner in 2016. No flight recorders were found, despite extensive searches.

Who were the passengers on Flight 980?

The plane carried 19 passengers and 10 crew members. Notable passengers included high-profile individuals such as the Director of the United States Peace Corps delegation to Paraguay, William Kelly, and Marian Davis, the wife of the US Ambassador to Paraguay. The Ambassador himself was supposed to be on the flight but had a last-minute change of plans.

What theories exist about the cause of the crash?

The official report attributed the crash to ‘controlled flight into terrain’ due to pilot error and poor visibility. However, there are theories suggesting a bomb on board, technical issues, or even a deliberate cover-up involving drug smuggling and political intrigue.

What role did Eastern Airlines play in the smuggling of illegal goods?

Eastern Airlines was implicated in drug smuggling operations, with significant amounts of cocaine found in suitcases flown from Colombia to Miami. The airline was fined and faced numerous indictments related to drug smuggling, which contributed to its financial decline and eventual dissolution in 1991.

What was the significance of the caiman skins found at the crash site?

The caiman skins were part of an illegal smuggling operation. Their presence in large quantities suggested that Eastern Airlines might have been involved in smuggling illegal goods, which could have influenced the thoroughness of the crash investigation.

What happened to the black box from Flight 980?

The black box, which contains the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, was never recovered in a usable condition. Pieces of the black box’s casing and some magnetic tape were found, but the tape contained a recording of a TV episode rather than flight data.

What was the outcome of the 2016 expedition to the crash site?

The 2016 expedition led by Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner found six small human remains and pieces of the black box’s casing. However, they did not find the flight recorders or any usable data. The expedition confirmed that the plane had disintegrated upon impact with the mountain.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Flight 980: The Mystery of the Missing Blackbox
• Hero image source by W. Bulach / openverse, by-sa.