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

[guohua]

OK, good news, as the article mentioned, they had been waiting and waiting for the Bolivian Government to allow the NTSB to examine the Black Box.

NTSB to Finally Examine Long Lost Black Box of Eastern Airlines Flight 980

FINALLY!

The National Transportation Safety Board is arranging to retrieve the remains of a black box belonging to Eastern Airlines Flight 980 from a Boston apartment, according to an email from an NTSB official that was shared with ABC News.

The email says Bolivian authorities have requested that the NTSB obtain the evidence and examine it in its lab in Washington, D.C.
In May 2016, best friends Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner of Boston climbed Bolivia's Mount Illimani and, at an elevation of 16,000 feet, recovered remains of what appears to be a black box from the doomed U.S. airliner.

Futrell and Stoner said their phone calls, emails and certified letters sent to the Bolivian Embassy in Washington went unanswered.
ABC News' efforts to reach Bolivian diplomats in the United States were unsuccessful.

On Dec. 1, Capt. Edgar Chavez, the operations inspector at the General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Bolivia, told ABC News that the Bolivian government would allow the NTSB to look at the tape found by Futrell and Stoner.

He was unable to say when that would occur, however, adding that his agency was "still working on the paperwork."
Chavez did not responded to follow-up calls and emails from ABC News requesting an update or another interview.

Wednesday's news that the NTSB received permission to examine the black box is a significant step forward in the search for answers to what many call the biggest aviation mystery of the 20th century. Many experts, including those at the NTSB, thought finding the flight recorders would be impossible, given the conditions on Mount Illimani.
It is unclear when, where or how the evidence will be handed over to the NTSB. The recorders remain in Futrell's apartment in a suburb of Boston.

Watch the video and read the article here: Source

[727Sky]

Thanks for posting that... In central and South America all we had were ADF navigation aides for enroute and approach. It really was a big deal when GPS navigation started being accepted for navigation.....  most of the airports had poor or non-existent radar especially in mountainous areas .  Quito Ecuador was another fun place to bust you ass both on approach and takeoff if something went wrong.

During the winter in the states I always flew south and have flown into La Paz with a 727... It was not a place I frequently bid to fly into.. Neither was Quito.. Many fellow pilots thought I was very brave to fly into some of the airports down south.... I was very good with an ADF navigation system but I was not stupid nor brave just careful... I will tell a funny story someday when I have time about San Salvador... however now I am off to win some money playing golf.... sorry !

[727Sky]

Wasn't my best round of golf but still managed to win a little.

Flying into Guatemala one night (we were the last scheduled aircraft for the day for landing; after us the controllers would go home)..... while we were just about 200 nm from the field Guatemala got radar contact with us. They wanted to know if we were ready to copy Guatemala's weather. There was fog at the field and low overcast conditions. The report said sky obscured with 1/4 mile visibility. The controller then asked what were our intensions ?

I told him I would go to San Salvador and get 50,000 pounds of fuel and come back to Guatemala and hold all night until they reported at least 200 overcast and 1/2 mile visibility.. The controller said, "Please standby". A couple of minutes later the controller said, "Oh, Continental you are very lucky tonight; the weather has improved to 200 overcast and 1/2 mile visibility (nice Spanish accent).. We shot an ILS approach and at our minimums we picked up the approach lights and runway... We landed like a cat pissing on a piece of velvet and went to the hotel.. 

They were landing to the south which was better for a successful outcome because landing to the north require making a 180 degree turn within the valley with hard mountains above the aircraft decent altitude within 5 miles; both directions worked just that landing south was easier and faster.

I liked flying south ...hell of allot better than the N.E. USA where one cloud in the area can make all traffic hold and divert to an alternate airport because the snitch computers, the controllers, and traffic load was always a struggle and not compatible..

An Airbus first officer landing in Guatemala landing to the south.. When after landing and the first officer changes pages to get the airport diagram for taxi the Captain has already taken control of the aircraft... Just so you won't think he is still in control of the aircraft landing roll out.

[guohua]

Update!

“We were close.”
That’s how Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner — the 30-something Bostonians who scaled Bolivia’s Mount Illimani to search for the black box of an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 downed in 1985 — reacted to the National Transportation Safety Board’s announcement that the debris they recovered hasn’t solved the mystery of the crash.
T
he flight, EA980, slammed into Illimani on Jan. 1, 1985, en route from Asuncion, Paraguay, to Miami. The bodies of the 29 passengers and crew on board, including eight Americans, were lost in the snow at 19,600 feet.

Last June, after a four-day trek to terrain investigators had deemed inaccessible, Futrell and Stoner discovered human remains and a few fragments of debris they hoped constituted the plane’s black box: several bright orange pieces of metal, a bundle of wires labeled “CKPT VO RCDR” and a damaged spool of magnetic tape. After a protracted struggle with Bolivian authorities, Futrell and Stoner turned over the recovered debris to the U.S. NTSB last month.

Today the agency confirmed the adventurers’ suspicions. The mangled metal fragments once housed the jet’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.
But the magnetic tape, which they suspected might contain data from the black box, instead held an episode of Bill Cosby’s adventure series “I Spy,” dubbed in Spanish, the NTSB said.

Source

The "I Spy" tape has me Baffled 
But I think these two young men will try again.