Passengers 19 Survivors 0 Date 1 January 1985 Total fatalities 29 (all) | Crew 10 Registration N819EA | |
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Similar Iberia Airlines Flight 610, Delta Air Lines Flight 191, Cathay Pacific Flight 700, Pakistan International Airlines Fl, Asiana Airlines Flight 733 | ||
Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 was a scheduled international flight from Asunción, Paraguay, to Miami, Florida, United States. On January 1, 1985, while descending towards La Paz, Bolivia, for a scheduled stopover, the Boeing 727 jetliner operating the flight struck Mount Illimani at an altitude of 19,600 feet (6,000 m), killing all 29 people on board.
Contents
- Accident
- On site investigation
- Discovery of the wreckage
- Discovery of flight recorder remnants
- References
The wreckage was scattered over a large area of a glacier covered with snow. Over the decades, several search expeditions were only able to recover a small amount of debris, and to date both flight recorders are still missing. The accident remains the highest-altitude controlled flight into terrain in commercial aviation history.
Accident
Flight 980 had departed Asunción at 17:57 on January 1, 1985. On board were 19 passengers and a crew of 10.
The Houston-based cockpit crew consisted of Captain Larry Campbell, First Officer Kenneth Rhodes, and Flight Engineer Mark Bird. The cabin crew comprised five Chilean flight attendants based in Santiago: Paul Adler, Pablo Letelier, Marilyn MacQueen, Robert O'Brien, and Paula Valenzuela.
The 19 passengers were from Paraguay, Ecuador, and the United States. Among the passengers was the wife of the U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, Marian Davis, and two Eastern pilots flying as passengers.
At 19:37 the pilot told controllers in La Paz he estimated landing at 19:47. The crew was cleared to descend from 25,000 feet to 18,000 feet. At some point after this exchange, the aircraft veered significantly off course for unknown reasons, possibly to avoid weather. The accident occurred 25 miles from runway 9R at El Alto Airport.
On-site investigation
In October 1985, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) selected Greg Feith, an air safety investigator, to lead a team of U.S. investigators and Bolivian mountain guides to conduct an on-site examination of the wreckage of Flight 980, which had come to rest around 6,126 metres (20,098 ft). Feith conducted the on-site investigation with the goal of finding the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), as well as retrieving other critical information; however, because the wreckage was spread over a vast area and covered by 6 to 9 m (20 to 30 ft) of snow, his fellow team members and he were unable to locate either of the "black boxes". He did retrieve various small parts of the aircraft cockpit, official flight-related paperwork, and some items from the passenger cabin.
Discovery of the wreckage
Over the years, the debris moved along with the glacier and eventually emerged enough that climbers were able to uncover wreckage in 2006. No bodies were found, though various personal effects of the passengers were recovered. Local climbers believed it was only a matter of time before bodies, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder emerged from the ice.
Discovery of flight recorder remnants
On June 4, 2016, after one of the warmest years on record in the area, human remains and a piece of wreckage labelled 'CKPT VO RCDR' were recovered by a team of five in the Andes mountains. Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner of Operation Thonapa recovered six large orange metal segments and several damaged pieces of magnetic tape.
On January 4, 2017, Futrell and Stoner – who had been inspired to undertake the search by reading of Flight 980 in the Wikipedia article "List of unrecovered flight recorders" – met with NTSB investigator Bill English to officially hand off the recovered components, following the approval in December 2016 of the Bolivian General Directorate of Civil Aviation for the NTSB to proceed with the analysis attempt.
On 7 February 2017, the NTSB released a statement, according to which what had been found was not the cockpit flight recorder, "but rather the rack that had fixed it on to the plane — and [a] promising spool of tape turned out to be 'an 18-minute recording of the Trial by Treehouse episode of the television series I Spy, dubbed in Spanish'."