On Friday, December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 departed JFK Airport around 10:20pm, with the Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar Whisperjet destined to land at Miami International two-hours and twenty minutes later. History shows they did not make it.
Onboard this red-eye shuttle flight were 163-passengers as well as 10-flight attendants and the flight crew; Captain Robert Loft, co-pilot Albert Stockstill, and the flight engineer, Don Repo. By all reports the flight was routine until they reached Miami and prepared for a landing, when the indicator light signaling that the front landing gear was down and locked failed to light-up.
The Miami Herald (December 31, 1972).
After several more attempts failed to get the proper signal, and assuming it was due to a burnt-out bulb, Flight 401 contacted air-traffic control, aborted the landing, and requested a holding pattern, wanting to circle around until they could visually confirm the landing gear was properly deployed. Told to head west over the Everglades and to circle at 2000-feet, Flight 401 complied.
From there, a series of small but accumulating missteps would end in disaster, beginning with Repo leaving the cockpit via the “Hell-Hole,” which led to the avionics bay directly below the cockpit to check on the landing gear, which was hampered further due to the darkness of the hour. Meanwhile, both pilots began to tinker and disassemble the landing gear-panel to try and trace the source of the malfunctioning indicator light, thinking the plane was on autopilot.
The Miami Herald (January 5, 1973).
Well, it was, but it wasn’t set right. Seems the autopilot on a Lockheed L-1011-1 could either be set and locked to maintain a certain constant altitude or set to hold at whatever altitude the pilot last left the control stick at. And so, at some point, the switch was accidentally toggled to the wrong setting. Thus, as the fatigued and frustrated pilots fought with the stubborn panel, any amount of forward pressure on the control yoke caused an imperceptible loss in altitude as the autopilot kept readjusting.
And as the seconds ticked away and the plane unwittingly got lower and lower, an altitude warning chime went off at the engineer's station, which went unheard because the engineer wasn’t there to hear it. And when the pilots finally realized how low they actually were it was already too late and Flight 401, in the middle of another scheduled turned, clipped into some trees and crashed, the left wing impacting first, which was then subsequently torn off, burrowing into the swamp at 227-mph, breaking up completely as it went.
Stewardess Beverly Jean Raposa later testified that she heard a surge of power just before the impact. Then she felt the plane crash. Said Raposa (The Miami News, March 6, 1973), "I saw a huge ball of orange and pink fire and heard a bang. Then I could see things flying all around me in the cabin.”
Now, there were two eye-witnesses to this crash on the ground: Robert “Bud” Marquis and Ray Dickinsin, who were out gigging frogs in an airboat. Said Marquis (The Tampa Bay Times, March 6, 1973), “I saw the plane kind of low on the horizon. In a matter of seconds there was a ball of fire that spread out over 1000-feet across the ‘Glades and was maybe 100-feet high.”
The Miami News (March 3, 1973).
The two men rushed to the scene, lit by burning fuel. As they got closer, Marquis slowed the boat down and steered toward some voices until his searchlight picked out “people lying in the water all over. I didn’t want to go any further for fear I’d run over them.” The men then started pulling survivors from the wreckage -- Marquis receiving severe burns over most of his body as a result. But he pressed on with his heroic efforts, shuttling the injured out of the water to drier and more solid ground.
Raposa, meanwhile, was secured to her seat when the plane impacted. As the fuselage cracked apart, she wound up tossed outside the plane still buckled into the jettisoned seat. “There was a rush of wind, like being in the middle of a tornado. The last thing I remember is fuel pouring like a waterfall over me.” Luckily, Raposa quickly regained consciousness and was able to unbuckle the harness, saying, “I just pushed with all my might and then I fell into the mud.”
The Windsor Star (February 2, 1977).
Oddly enough it was crashing into the muddy waters of the Everglades, softening and dampening the impact, that allowed for any survivors at all. The caking mud also served as impromptu pressure bandages, preventing massive blood loss in some victims, but also caused problems with infection.
In all, thanks to calm heads and valiant rescue efforts, 77-passengers and 8-flight attendants were rescued and survived the crash. (Raposa would encourage other gathered survivors to join her in singing Christmas carols until they were evacuated.) Both pilots were killed on impact, but Repo survived in the nose of the plane, was evacuated to a hospital, but later succumbed to his internal injuries.
Ultimately, after a thorough investigation, the fault of the crash was classified as “Pilot Error” as it was "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the ‘nose landing gear position indicating system’ distracted the crew's attention and allowed the descent to go unnoticed (The Miami Herald, January 5, 1973).”
In response to this tragedy, many airlines established new protocols for their pilots and crews when confronted with faulty equipment, requiring at least one pilot to be monitoring the other instruments at all times, to prevent this from ever happening again.
The Los Angeles Times (October 29, 1979).
This tragic tale would eventually be translated into two books: Rob and Sarah Elder’s Crash (1977), which inspired a Made-for-TV movie, Barry Shear’s Crash (alias The Crash of Flight 401, 1978) for ABC-TV. The Elders were reporters for The Miami Herald, who covered the tragedy and its aftermath. Both their book and the telefilm focused solely on the crash itself and the investigation by the NTSB. And while the film dramatized the crash, it was mostly concerned with the man in charge of that dogged investigation (William Shatner) as he fights for the truth and resists a possible cover-up by the airline and the plane’s manufacturer.
However, the tale told by the other book, John G. Fuller’s The Ghost of Flight 401 (1975), which also inspired another telefilm for NBC-TV, doesn’t end with the crash or even the resulting investigation. No, according to Fuller, that was only the beginning of the story as the crash of Flight 401 also spawned a ghostly urban legend that haunted Eastern Airlines and her flight crews and passengers for years after that fateful night…
The Mansfield News-Journal (February 11, 1979).
John Grant Fuller Jr. was a New England based journalist, who wrote a column for the Saturday Review magazine. He was also notorious for writing articles about the UFO phenomenon, metaphysics, and other supernatural shenanigans, which soon turned into an obsession with several books written to cash-in.
First up was Incident at Exeter (1966), which established the author’s modus operandi of heavy research and exhaustive interviews with alleged eye-witnesses on a rash of UFO sightings in New Hampshire. Fuller followed that up with An Interrupted Journey (1966), which focused on Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple, who claimed they were abducted by aliens and experimented on -- which was also adapted as a Made for TV Movie, Richard Colta's The UFO Incident (1975). And in 1974, Fuller published We Almost Lost Detroit; an exposé on a near-miss, Chernobyl-level incident that railed against the dangers of atomic energy.
Now, Steven Hilliard Stern’s TV-adaptation of Fuller’s book, The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978), begins with ominous portent, personified by a wife’s unheeded pleas that her husband, a flight engineer, call in sick and skip his next scheduled flight.
But despite his wife’s unease and feelings of impending dread, Dom Cimoli (Borgnine) never called in sick a day in his life. And so, he kisses his wife, Maria (Rossen), goodbye and heads to the airport.
From there, the film hews fairly close to the truth as we meet the rest of the passengers and crew in short order, including the two pilots (Johnson, Hessemen), and Prissy Fraiser (Basinger), one of the stewardesses, as the plane takes off from Florida without incident, makes it to JFK, and then starts back on its return trip to Miami. Alas, as we already know, the plane doesn’t make it for the same reasons described above.
What followed were a few harrowing scenes of the downed airplane and pulling survivors from the half-submerged wreckage, including Prissy and Cimoli, who was in the nose of the plane, checking on the landing gear, when 401 crashed. And like his real life counterpart, Cimoli later died at the hospital.
In the aftermath, the film essentially glosses over the investigation covered in the Elders’ book, quickly chalking it up to pilot error and moving on. For you see, both Fuller’s book and the movie inspired by it were less interested in what happened before the crash, or the crash itself, and more interested in what happened after, especially the salvageable parts of Flight 401.
See, once they were released by the NTSB, according to Fuller, the pieces of the downed airliner were cannibalized and recycled as spare parts -- most notably an oven door, while even larger sections were used and incorporated in the construction of brand new TriStars by Lockheed. But the book nor the telefilm wasn’t necessarily interested in those parts themselves, either, but what managed to latch onto them -- ecto-plasmically speaking.
Seems at some point after the real-life crash, there were numerous sightings by multiple witnesses of the ghost of both Loft and Repo, mostly on other flights by both passengers and crew; some who knew and recognized them, while others were complete strangers as they seemed to keep a silent vigil over the jet-liners.
In one instance a flight's captain and two flight attendants claimed to have seen and spoken to Loft before take-off, watched him vanish, and were so shaken by this they canceled their flight. Another incident found an Eastern Airlines executive having a one-sided conversation with whom he assumed was the captain of his flight only to realize it was Loft he was talking to.
On another flight, a hysterical passenger called for a stewardess because she was concerned for an unresponsive man in uniform, who looked pale and ill, sitting next to her, who subsequently vanished into thin air. The passenger would later identify Repo as the man she’d seen.
Witnesses didn’t always get the silent treatment either, especially from the ghost of Repo, who would materialize during pre-flight inspections and offer to help or just pitch in, or having been spotted several times in a plane’s galley, either his reflection in the glass or fully manifested and tinkering with that recycled oven door. He was also spotted in a Hell-Hole once when the command crew heard knocking from below.
But the most notorious incident happened on a flight to Mexico City, where Repo was once more spotted in the galley by a flight attendant. She reported this to the captain, who sent the engineer to check it out. The engineer recognized his old friend immediately as he intoned a warning from the beyond to “Watch out for fire on this airplane.” And sure enough, one of the engines caught fire; but the plane managed to land safely when the fire just as mysteriously put itself out.
During a later encounter, Repo promised, "There will never be another crash. We will not let it happen."
At least some twenty ghostly encounters were reported, and at some point someone put it together that these paranormal activities were only happening on planes with recycled parts from the doomed Flight 401.
“It is Fuller’s practice, especially when dealing with incredible subject matter such as UFOs and ghosts, to do careful research and to document everything very carefully,” said Terry Mapes (The Mansfield News-Journal, February 11, 1979). “Until The Ghost of Flight 401, he also maintained complete objectivity. He sought to report what happened, or what witnesses said happened, without offering explanations of his own. But the documentation he collected for The Ghost of Flight 401 (novel) was so convincing that even Fuller was convinced that the ghost of a crew member of the Eastern Airlines plane that crashed had returned to haunt other flights.”
Fort Lauderdale News (February 18, 1978).
Said Debby Holmes (The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 19, 1976), “For reasons known only to himself, Fuller is a sucker for a good supernatural / extraterrestrial yarn. His books are almost down to a formula: Profess disbelief. Reluctantly spell out the fantastic allegations (re:ghost, UFOs, whatever). Sift through the evidence. Shyly admit that, darn it, you’re convinced. His latest book is formula -- but, darn it, it’s fascinating.”
In the same article, Fuller admitted to Holmes, “Sometimes I wonder myself how I got into it. I have to say that the idea of official pilot reports of a ghost on a modern jumbo jet airliner like Eastern’s L1011 intrigued me. I heard about it from so many airline people, friends of mine, that I had to look into it.”
Fuller then spent the next seven months researching the alleged incidents, interviewing pilots, stewardesses, flight engineers, FAA personnel, and even mediums and parapsychologists. “The story was hard to grab, and several times I felt like giving up,” said Fuller.
But, “Just as I was about to, another incident would turn up and keep me going. All of the Eastern personnel were afraid to talk, but they gave good evidence of the validity of the appearances of the deceased flight engineer of Flight 401, who was purported to appear as a full-scale apparition in many flights. This is hard to believe. But when I found out that three senior pilots had actually performed a form of exorcism on the plane that was most frequently visited by the apparition, I knew I had to keep going.”
Now, Fuller would employ two assistants on the book: Rachelle Faul, a Miami journalism student, who focused on tracking down two Eastern pilots who also claimed to be mediums, and who would play a pivotal part in both the book and the movie; and Elizabeth Manzione, a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines, who later admitted that she scratched down many of her catch-as-catch-can interviews with friends and co-workers on air sickness bags.
Manzione first met Fuller on a shared flight, was intrigued by what he was working on, and offered to help out on his research. “Because Northwest and Eastern Airlines shared facilities in a number of airports, Elizabeth had friends and acquaintances among the Eastern flight personnel,” reported Kathryn Boardman (Knight-Ridder News Service, February 11, 1979). “She and Fuller both believed that the flight crews would be more apt to talk about the ghost with her than with an outsider, which Fuller was.”
Boardman then continued, saying, “Fuller took Manzione on as a freelance researcher, paying her by the hour. She had a head start on her work because the story of the Ghost of 401 had circulated through all the airlines flight personnel. Don Repo’s ghost had become a legend or a folk figure among pilots and crews. She was able to obtain names of persons who professed to have seen the apparition and of persons who had heard stories from them.”
The book was eventually published in 1976. As for their end results? “When Fuller doesn’t get in the way of his material, the story seems to tell itself rather well,” said critic Robert Weiner (The Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1976). “Such works usually make interesting reading, but this unique story really deserved a better storyteller.”
However, that was a rare blemish as the vast majority of the reviews I dug up on The Ghost of Flight 401 were positive, whether they believed in the viability of its assertions and conclusions or not.
“The Ghost of Flight 401 is well worth the price,” said Don Mactavish (The Windsor Star February 19, 1977). “Fuller’s reconstruction of actual tragedy will never again allow the reader to encounter news reports of air catastrophes without feeling the full, agonizing impact on the passengers and crews and the families and friends they leave behind. Nor is The Ghost of Flight 401 merely a spine-tingling tale: It’s a paralyzing terror that leaves you literally gasping for breath.” And in the end, the book would be a best-seller and, like the Elders, would earn Fuller a Movie-of-the-Week deal.
For their part, Eastern Air Lines vehemently denied or downplayed these incidents. Former Apollo astronaut and (then) current Eastern CEO Frank Borman called Fuller’s collected ghost stories a load of horseshit. Borman even considered suing the author for libel, based on his assertions of a cover-up by the airline, but nixed it, not wanting to give Fuller any free publicity.
Thus, according to Fredric Tasker (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 9, 1977), Eastern Airlines official take was: “They don’t think Fuller’s ghost stories will do the airline any harm because reasonable people won’t believe them. They said they checked the ghost rumors and found them without basis. They said no employees were referred to the company psychiatrist for telling ghost stories.” They also claimed, “No ovens were salvaged from the plane” and “everything was melted down after the investigation.”
The Elders backed this up, telling Tasker in their months of research for their book, “We never saw or heard anything to indicate anybody ever saw any ghosts.” And Repo’s widow “confirmed that every part of the book that concerned her was factual as far as she knew but declined to comment further.”
As for Fuller, he confessed to Tasker, “Since I didn’t see one myself, I can’t testify to it. But I think there’s strong evidence. The people I talked to were all solid and non-spook-and-kook types. I have no reason to disbelieve that they were telling the truth as they saw it.”
The family of Captain Loft did file a lawsuit against Fuller over the book and NBC for the telefilm for invasion of privacy. According to the Associated Press (The Charlotte Observer, April 27, 1978), “The survivors of Eastern Airlines captain Robert Loft say the book, written by John Fuller and sold as nonfiction, and the NBC-TV movie have subjected the family to morbid curiosity. The family claim they were harassed by people wanting to know if they were able to talk to the deceased.” The suit sought to stop sales of the book and any rebroadcast of the film; they also asked for damages and a share of the royalties since Fuller never asked them for permission or a release. The case was later thrown out of court.
This type of lawsuit was the reason the telefilm focused solely on the ghost of the flight engineer, with Cimoli serving as a fictionalized Repo, which recreated many of the incidents described above. They also fictionalized the airline to Atlantic Southeastern. As to why they never bothered to change the pilots’ names is a bit of a puzzler, which left them wide open, legally.
In adapting the book, screenwriter Malcom Young told Barbara Holsopple (The Pittsburgh Press February 17, 1978) that he “focused on just one of the ghosts, Flight Officer Don Repo. It was Repo who appeared most frequently and whose story is heightened by interviews his family granted the Fullers," said Young. "On at least two occasions [his ghost] warned of mechanical problems that did, indeed, exist.”
According to Holsopple, Young approached the project with skepticism, but admitted, “The book is so carefully researched with scientific detail. Fuller really hooked me," said Young. "And when he goes into the parapsychology end of it, I found myself believing that, too -- up to a point.” This “point” is where Young chose to stop.” (Which we’ll be addressing in a second.) Said Young, “With fantasy you can stretch the imagination beyond any known boundaries. With truth, if you aren’t careful, fact looks so fanciful you lose your credibility.”
Adding a lot to the film’s credibility was Ernest Borgnine, who does excellent work as always, humanizing a character in a plot full of ciphers, who are only there to string several events together. The chemistry between Borgnine and Carol Rossen as the Cimolis is brief but palpable.
Beyond that, you got Gary Lockwood, a novice Kim Basinger, and a ton of familiar TV-faces, who bring a sense of true camaraderie and sell the hell out of these incidents -- and sharp ears will easily identify veteran voice-man Paul Frees as the narrator, who also pops up constantly as several other voices either on the radio or the intercom.
Essentially a journeyman episodic TV-director with a few feature films under his belt like The Devil and Max Devlin (1981), Stern did carve out quite the niche directing Made for TV Movies, most notably the Satanic Panic staple Mazes and Monsters (1982) and Hostage Flight (1985).
Here, Stern does an admirable job of mixing the straight with the supernatural by making the right decision not to sensationalize anything as the whole film comes off very sober -- almost procedural. Stern and cinematographer Howard Schwartz’s use of a free-floating, subjective camera gives the viewer a sense of something ethereal moving through several scenes post-crash; and I love the subtle use of camera movements in the slow-pans or tracks over an empty seat, only to look back a second later and see someone who definitely wasn’t there before, who then just as quickly disappears.
Also! Even on the brutally washed-out print I watched on YouTube, the creepiness of the aftermath of the crash, with survivors moving and floundering in the muddy water amongst the dead and the burning wreckage are harrowing and startlingly effective; and, again, makes you wish someone would give these old telefilms a digital upgrade.
Screenwriter Young also had a prolific career on the small screen, penning several other movies of the week, including Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (1979) and Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983). And while The Ghost of Flight 401 is enjoyable enough as is, it might’ve been better served to flesh-out the middle a bit between the crash and the first sighting as we get forty minutes of a disaster movie followed up by an hour long crypto-doc that gets kind of stuck in a cycle of sighting, denial, sighting, denial, sighting, denial, and so forth.
Meanwhile, a tight-knit group of pilots, engineers and flight attendants (Miller, Lyons, Chen) try to unravel the mystery of why the spirit of their dearly departed friend hasn’t moved on, while also trying to hang onto their jobs when they effort to report the truth of what they’ve encountered to the higher-ups; namely some weaselly pencil-pusher named Evanhower (Lockwood), who serves as our Doubting Thomas until Cimoli’s voice appears on an inflight recording from beyond the grave.
And so, with concrete proof, this same group seeks out the help of those mediums / pilots (Roche, Oppenheimer) I mentioned earlier, who explain the psychometry of what happened. They then perform some kind of seance / ritual cleansing that encourages the spirit of their departed friend to let go of his guilt and cross over into the light.
Young would leave out several elements of Fuller’s book, omitting the protestant “exorcism” of the most haunted plane by a fundamentalist pilot, as well as the exhaustive efforts to contact Repo on “the other side.”
It was Manzione who pushed Fuller to use seances and a Ouija board to try and contact the spirits of the deceased, claiming it unlocked her own psychic abilities. Fuller and Manzione would eventually marry not long after the book was completed. The “psychic stewardess” would then chronicle this love story and delve further into the preternatural aspects of their investigation in her own book, My Search for the Ghost of Flight 401 (1978).
Thus, Stern and Young rightfully chose to end the film with the spiritual cleansing and the airline finally caving in and removing all those recycled parts of Flight 401 from their fleet. And with that, with Cimoli finally able to rest in peace, these multiple hauntings and sightings (and the movie and this review) suddenly came to an abrupt end.
Originally posted on October 12, 2016 at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978) Paramount Television :: National Broadcasting Company (NBC) / P: Emmet G. Lavery Jr. / D: Steven Hilliard Stern / W: Robert M. Young, John G. Fuller / C: Howard Schwartz / E: Harry Keller / M: David Raksin / S: Ernest Borgnine, Carol Eve Rossen, Gary Lockwood, Tina Chen, Kim Basinger, Howard Hesseman, Russell Johnson, Robert F. Lyons, Alan Oppenheimer, Eugene Roche, Paul Frees
No comments:
Post a Comment