Eastern Airlines Flight 401 departed John F. Kennedy International Airport on the evening of December 29, 1972, bound for Miami International Airport. The aircraft was a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, one of the most technologically advanced widebody jets in commercial service, delivered to Eastern Airlines less than a year earlier. Captain Robert Loft, a veteran with
United Airlines Flight 173 departed Denver on the afternoon of December 28, 1978, bound for Portland, Oregon. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-61, registration N8082U, carrying 181 passengers and a crew of eight under the command of Captain Malburn McBroom, a veteran pilot with more than 27,000 flight hours. First Officer Rodrick Beebe and
American Airlines Flight 965 departed Miami International Airport on the evening of December 20, 1995, bound for Cali, Colombia, with 155 passengers and 8 crew members aboard. The Boeing 757-200 was a Christmas holiday flight: families heading home, travelers reuniting. The routing was straightforward, the aircraft was in good working order, and the experienced crew
Continental Connection Flight 3407 departed Newark Liberty International Airport late on the evening of February 12, 2009, already two hours behind schedule. The Bombardier Q400 turboprop, operated by Colgan Air on behalf of Continental Airlines, carried 45 passengers and 4 crew members on a routine 53-minute flight to Buffalo Niagara International Airport. At the controls
TWA Flight 800 had already been on the ground at John F. Kennedy International Airport for more than an hour when it finally pushed back from the gate on the evening of July 17, 1996. The aircraft was a Boeing 747-131, registration N93119, manufactured in 1971 and now in its 25th year of service. It
ValuJet Flight 592 departed Miami International Airport on the afternoon of May 11, 1996, bound for Atlanta on what should have been a routine two-hour flight. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32, registration N904VJ. There were 105 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The weather was clear, visibility unrestricted. Six minutes after takeoff,
On the morning of March 27, 1977, a bomb in the passenger terminal at Gran Canaria’s Las Palmas Airport diverted dozens of flights to Los Rodeos Airport on the neighboring island of Tenerife. Los Rodeos was a small regional airport, built for inter-island traffic, and by early afternoon its taxiways were lined with wide-body jets
Commercial aviation is the safest form of long-distance travel in the history of transportation. That fact is not inevitable, and it is not accidental. It is the result of generations of accident investigators, engineers, and regulators who examined failures with methodical precision and then changed the rules. Every time something went wrong and people died,
US Airways Flight 1549 departed LaGuardia Airport’s Runway 04 at 15:24:54 local time on January 15, 2009, bound for Charlotte Douglas with 150 passengers and 5 crew members on board. At 15:27:11, approximately 2.5 minutes into the climb and at an altitude of about 2,818 feet over Queens, New York, the aircraft entered a flock
Air France Flight 447 departed Rio de Janeiro’s Guarulhos Airport at 22:29 local time on June 1, 2009, bound for Paris Charles de Gaulle with 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the Airbus A330 crossed the equatorial Atlantic at 35,000 feet, the autopilot disconnected.
