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The Ghosts of Eastern Airlines
By: Kasmine Reed
The brothers Wilber and Orville Wright brought their airplane to the beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. They had built the airplane themselves. The body was made of slender sticks and the wings were covered with linen cloth.
With the four cylinders engine clattering the plane bounced along the sandy beach. It lifted itself free and sailed through the air one chilly morning. It did the same flight four times before noon. The best flight saw the airplane soar for a distance of eight hundred fifty two feet.
The Wright brothers had made the world's first flights in a powered aircraft. Those scary flights marked the birth of the age of aviation.
Almost seventy years later, a giant airplane passed close to the beach at Kitty Hawk. The airplane was a Lockheed L-1011. It was powered by three Rolls Royce jet engines. It was flying from New York's Kennedy International Airport to Miami International Airport in Florida. On board this night of December 29, 1976 were one hundred seventy six passengers and the flight crew. Like the Wright brother's plane the airplane was about to make history but for a different reason. It was about to give birth to the greatest aviation ghost story of our time.
The flight went smoothly that night. The air was calm and there were very few clouds in the sky. The lights of Miami came into view. The plane began to drop down from the landing. It swept over the Everglades but the L-1011 never made it to the runway. It crashed into the Everglades.
The plane cut a path 1,600 feet long before finally coming to rest. The crash took the lives of ninety nine people on board. Seventy seven survivors were rescued by emergency crews on the ground. Most of them suffered serious injuries and burns. Among the dead were two members of the flight crew. One was the captain of the giant airplane. The other was the flight engineer. These crash survivors died seven days after this horrible incident.
After the years long investigation the cause of the crash was never determined by the experts.
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