Eastern Air Lines Flight 980

Eastern Air Lines Flight 980
An identical Boeing 727 from Eastern Air Lines
Accident summary
Accident type	Controlled flight into terrain
place	Illimani , Bolivia
date	January 1, 1985
Fatalities	29
Survivors	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Boeing 727-225 Adv.
operator	Eastern Air Lines
Mark	N819EA
Departure airport	Asunción Airport , Paraguay
1. Stopover	La Paz Airport , Bolivia
2. Stopover	Guayaquil Airport , Ecuador
Destination airport	Miami Airport , Florida , United States
Passengers	19th
crew	10
Lists of aviation accidents

The Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 (flight number IATA : EA980 , ICAO : EAL980 , call sign: EASTERN 980 ) was a line intercontinental flight from the Paraguayan capital Asuncion to Miami , Florida with scheduled stops in La Paz , Bolivia and Guayaquil , Ecuador . On January 1, 1985, crashed on this flight Boeing 727-225 Adv. Of Eastern Air Lines on Mount Illimani in Bolivia, where all 29 occupants of the machine were killed. The impact occurred at a height of about 6,000 meters above sea level. It is the highest altitude controlled flight into terrain in the history of commercial aviation. Since the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder could never be recovered, the exact cause of the accident could never be clarified.

machine

The aircraft involved in the accident was a Boeing 727-225 Adv., Which was two years and ten months old at the time of the accident. The machine was the work number 22556 , it was the 1,793th of 1832. produced Boeing 727. The Boeing 727 was involved in the work of Boeing on the Boeing Field in the state of Washington assembled and completed on 12 March 1982 its first flight before it was delivered to Eastern Airlines on April 7, 1982, where it received the aircraft registration number N819EA and the fleet number 819 . The three-engine medium-range narrow-body aircraft was equipped with three Turbojettriebwerken type Pratt & Whitney JT8D-17AR equipped.

crew

On board the machine was a ten-person flight crew, which was composed of a three-person cockpit crew consisting of the flight captain Larry Campbell, the first officer Kenneth Rhodes and the flight engineer Mark Bird as well as a seven-person cabin crew consisting of seven flight attendants.

Passengers

The first leg of the flight from Asunción to La Paz had taken 19 passengers who were citizens of the United States , South Korea and Paraguay . Among the passengers were two Eastern Airlines pilots who were out of service at the time.

Flight plan

The scheduled intercontinental flight EA980 was scheduled to take off from Asunción Airport at 5:57 p.m. on New Year's Day 1985 . The first flight segment should lead to La Paz Airport in Bolivia . Then the machine was supposed to fly to Guayaquil Airport before the last flight segment to Miami International Airport in Florida , USA .

the accident

On the approach to La Paz, the pilots reported to the responsible air traffic control that they had flown over the "DAKON" hub located 55 nautical miles southeast of the destination airport. The machine was at an altitude of 25,000 feet at the time. The pilots then received clearance to descend to 18,000 feet, which they then confirmed. The machine was then supposed to follow the UA 320 airway on a course of 134 degrees in the direction of the rotary beacon in La Paz, but deviated significantly from the course, probably when the pilots tried to avoid a bad weather front. The machine hit a flank of Mount Illimani , a 6,439-meter-high Andean peak , at 19,600 feet (about 6,000 meters) . The scene of the accident was located about 26 nautical miles from the rotary beacon in La Paz and 25 nautical miles from the airport runway 09R.

Accident investigation, search for the flight recorders

It was assumed that the crew of the machine could not see and avoid the high terrain along the flown route due to the darkness, the difficult weather conditions and no visual reference points in the area.

An immediate rescue and accident investigation was not possible due to the wintry conditions on the Illimani. In October 1985, an expedition of Bolivian mountaineers and US aviation accident investigators, including NTSB chief investigator Greg Feith , reached the scene of the accident. The expedition could not find any bodies or the flight recorders. The wreckage was scattered over a wide area and covered with a layer of snow six to nine meters thick. It was only possible to recover small wreckage from the cockpit of the machine, objects from the cabin and flight documents. When the weather conditions deteriorated and some expedition participants developed altitude sickness , the expedition was forced to turn back without having recovered the flight data recorders.

Another private expedition led by Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner reached the scene of the accident in May and June 2016. The search conditions were much easier than 31 years earlier, as the Illimani glacier had partially melted due to global warming, making it easier to see traces of the accident. The expedition found body parts and many crocodile skins, which indicated smuggling activities on board the aircraft. Furthermore, pieces of orange painted metal with cable remains and the inscription "CKPT VO RCDR" could be recovered, as well as magnetic tapes that the expedition members kept for the voice recorder. However, an evaluation of the tapes by the National Transportation Safety Board showed that they were only parts of the voice recorder housing. The tapes also had nothing to do with the voice recorder - to them was a 18-minute, in was Spanish set to music section of the television series I Spy (dt .: I Spy ), a crime drama from 1965 with Bill Cosby and Robert Culp .

swell

• Accident report B-727-225, N819EA in the Aviation Safety Network

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Operating history of the machine on rzjets.net
2. ^ Dan Futrell: The debris of Flight 980. In: Operation Thonapa. June 12, 2016, accessed on April 13, 2017 (English): " In addition to debris from the Boeing 727-225, we also found six instances of human remains " 
3. ↑ Isaac Stoner: An International Smuggling Ring Driven by Gross 80's Fashion. In: Operation Thonapa. May 31, 2016, accessed April 13, 2017 . 
4. ^ Dan Futrell: 31 years later, we found the flight recorders. In: Operation Thonapa. June 3, 2016, accessed April 13, 2017 . 
5. ^ National Transportation Safety Board: NTSB Completes Evaluation of Materials from Eastern Airlines Flight 980. February 7, 2017, accessed on April 13, 2017 (English). 

Coordinates: 16 ° 38 ′ 10 ″  S , 67 ° 47 ′ 21 ″  W.