Eastern Airlines Flight 980

[guohua]

I doubt anyone here well remember this Unfortunate Flight and it's Passengers and Crew, except maybe 727Sky.
According to the article, I believe they are trying to say a Failure of Technology and Weather, it also took a special kind of training for the Pilot's, Now the Plane was Mile Off Course when this all happened because the Tower at the airport had No Radar!

You need to read the attached article, I believe the Bolivian Government is extremely embarrassed because of their failure to launch a successful recovery mission, they didn't even find the black boxes or return with any bodies, I don't think they even made it there to the crash site.

No these two young Americans worked out and trained and made it.

 Dan and Isaac scaled Mt. Illimani after reading about the missing black boxes on Wikipedia.   

On New Year’s Day 1985, Eastern Airlines Flight 980 was on its way from Asuncion, Paraguay, to Miami. The flight was scheduled to stop first in La Paz, the legislative capital of Bolivia, then Guayaquil, Ecuador, before a final leg to the United States.

The airport serving La Paz, known as El Alto, is the highest international airport in the world. The runway is perched at just over 13,000 feet above sea level.

Skyscraping mountains surround the airport, and pilots need a special certification to land there.
“It’s basically a slam dunk,” ABC News consultant and former National Transportation Safety Board official Tom Haueter said. “You have to come in from high altitude, quickly descend down to the airport. This is not your typical airport approach at all.”

El Alto did not have radar, and regular cloud cover made the approach all the more challenging.
In 1985, if pilots were unable to spot the visual cues to the airport, they were effectively flying blind.
On the night of the ill-fated flight, the pilots of Eastern Airlines Flight 980 faced a cloudy night with thunderstorms in the area.
Bolivian air traffic controllers cleared the Boeing 727 to descend to 18,000 feet on its approach to La Paz.

That was the last communication with the doomed flight.

What Bolivian controllers did not know was that the flight was several miles off course.
The plane crashed into the south side of the 21,000-foot Mount Illimani at an elevation of 19,600 feet, killing all 29 people on board, including eight Americans, one of whom was the wife of the ambassador to Paraguay. The accident was, at the time, the highest-elevation plane crash in the world.
It was so high that rescue helicopters could not reach the site. It had to be accessed by foot.

An international effort to recover the plane, its passengers and the flight recorders began immediately.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board assisted the Bolivians in the investigation, but no one could make it to the crash site for days.
When some climbers did get to the site, they were unable to remain long at the extreme altitude, and their search for clues was fruitless.

An expedition was sent later that year in another attempt to locate the flight recorders, according to Federal Aviation Administration documents. Investigators reached the accident site, but poor conditions and altitude sickness forced the team to turn back without recovering the recorders.
The investigation then came to a halt, with no definitive cause for the crash determined. At least three private searches were mounted but came up empty-handed as well.

They got in contact with family members of the victims and those who had spent much of their lives looking for answers.

Stacey Greer was among them.

Her father, Mark Bird, was the engineer and second officer aboard Eastern Airlines Flight 980. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the plane that day; another crew member had fallen ill, and Bird replaced him, Greer said.

Greer, who was only 2 at the time of the crash, connected with Futrell and Stoner in April this year after author and former Eastern Airlines pilot George Jehn spotted Futrell and Stoner's blog.

Jehn’s book, “Final Destination: Disaster: What Really Happened to Eastern Airlines,” is packed with research, theories and questions about the circumstances of the flight.
From questioning why the route existed in the first place to why the recovery effort was fruitless, the book examines the mystery of Eastern Airlines Flight 980.

The first sign of the crash they found on their two-week trip was a life jacket at an abandoned mine. Someone had apparently carried it from the debris field down to the mine. “That’s the first time where it was kind of real,” Futrell said.


The next day, they were off to the debris field, heading straight toward the summit.

Futrell and Stoner knew their mission was a difficult if not impossible one. So they prepared themselves for the reality of their operation.


“So we kind of outlined minor wins along the way,” Stoner said. “The first was just getting to the debris field, seeing that there were plane parts there.”

As soon as they reached the crest of a moraine on their path to the debris field, they spotted a landing-gear wheel.


The first win, at 16,000 feet.


They were in the right place, but the debris field was larger than they anticipated.
They had a plan to carefully cover the field in a grid, but now the plan was off. There were plane parts everywhere, scattered over about a square mile, they estimated.

Along with plane parts, human remains were constant finds during their days on Mount Illimani.


The weight of the discovery is evident on the faces of the two former roommates when they speak of it, even months after their return. Their decision about what to do with the remains is evidently not one they took lightly.


Futrell and Stoner decided to bury the remains and mark each one with GPS coordinates in case family members wanted to locate them.
They spent four days searching the area, finding various plane parts and human remains but no sure sign of the flight recorders.

Soon Futrell found a damaged spool of tape. It appeared to be the same kind of tape that would have been in a black box used in the 1980s. He knew it could be important. Another win but not confirmation.

On their last day, just below 17,000 feet, Stoner flipped over a piece of metal with a bundle of wires. On that bundle was a strap reading “CKPT VO RCDR.”

Read the rest of this amazing article and the parts I left out and watch the video here: Source