TOAD: The Twofold Terror of Flight 401

takes a pretty fucking terrifying paranormal twist. So please fasten your seatbelts ensure your tray table is secured in the upright position while I tell you the sad and spooky story of Eastern Airlines Flight four zero one. It's just before midnight on December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy two, when two forty one three year old mates named Rob and Ray are out on their airboat in the Florida Everglades.

Frog gigging start with the googling even for me, I know, but how can you not look up what frog gigging is. It's not very nice. It's basically stunning these poor frogs with a flashlight, then catching and killing them before selling them off for their hind legged meat to what I'd

assume to be very fancy French restaurants, very seventies. Anyway, don't judge the old fellows too harshly just yet, because while they're out on the water, they hear a crash and see this massive flash of light off in the distance. And it's very dark out there because they're out in the middle of nowhere where there's no homes or street

lights or anything like that. So the only light source that they have are these headlamps that they're wearing, you know, to spot and stun poor old Kerman and friends, and also to keep an eye out for alligators because they're all over the joint in this area. Remember that movie Wild Things with Matt Dillon, Nev Camberl, and Denise Richards. I'm pretty sure there was a threesome involved in there somewhere, but I think that movie was set in the Everglades

if you need a visual. Anyway, back to the story, Rob and Ray are obviously good men because instead of running away from this explosion in the chicken shit fashion someone like myself would, they put their airboat into turbo mode and just rush towards it and when they get there, all they can hear are these cries for help and moans of pain, but they can't actually see anything because

remember it's almost midnight and it's pitch black. So Rob switches on his frog murdering headlamp and he and Ray freeze when they realize that the crashing sound and burst of light that they saw from out on the water is a commercial plane and they are taking in a real life nightmare scenario because there are people screaming and begging for help, and there is wreckage and bodies and just shit everywhere. So once they're over that initial shock,

they spring into action and start rescuing people. So what the fuck has just happened? Well, glad you asked, Let's rewind back three hours and I'll explain. Hi, Megan, I'm just three hours younger. We're at around nine pm, same date, twenty ninth of December nineteen seventy two, where Eastern Airlines flight four zero one is at New York's JFK Airport. Cabin crew are doing their final checks and making sure

passengers are all buckled in prior to take off. And I'm pretty certain that because we're in the glory days of the nineteen seventies. They're probably also asking people to make sure their ciggies are safely extinguished in the ash tray provided in their arm rests. Seems unbelievable even that you could take a lighter onto a plane loose. Anyway, the flight crew are in the cockpit doing all those very important final checklist things, and soon they start taxing

down the runway. There's one hundred and sixty three passengers and thirteen crew on board, and the assumption is that most people were probably in good spirits because it had just been Christmas. They're escaping New York, which is freezing as fuck at that time of year, and gearing up to trade their snow boots for Havianas because this flight is going to Miami, just like in that ship will Smith Song. The head honcho that night was a very experienced pilot named Bob Loft. Bob was fifty five and

a total pro. He was known for being a very cool cucumber, with over thirty thousand flight hours under his belt, so you know, he's the kind of guy you want at the controls. To captain Bob's right was thirty nine year old First Officer Bert stock still the co pilot, another very experienced flying person. Now a detail that's important to this story is that this particular plane was part of this new fleet to Eastern Airlines called the Lockheed L ten eleven tri Star, which I assume is like

saying Boeing seven four seven or whatever. And these things cost a bomb because not only with a state of the ar in terms of technology, they were also massive, kind of like a commodore station wagon of the skies, a real people mover, because this baby could accommodate up

to four hundred passengers. To give you a visual, the plane was split across two levels, so the top level was where all the passengers sat and the cockpit and stuff were, and the bottom level, which was staff only, was only accessible via these two tiny lifts, which sounds extremely scary but also good times, because I reckon it would have been like Parties Central. Down there. There was a giant kitchen with storage and fridges and ovens to warm up your party pies, and then there was a

lounge area for the crew. And I mean imagine the opportunity that set up would have presented for some serious workplace shenanigans. Anyway, while some say size does not matter, it absolutely does in this story because the spaciousness of this aircraft also meant that the cockpit was roomier than

the ordinarily tight space on the standards smaller planes. So instead of the cockpit being a party of two, this one was a party of four, So joining Captain Bob and First Officer Bird up in the top spot with fifty one year old flight engineer Don Repo and forty seven year old Eastern Airlines employee Angelo Donnadio. So at nine to twenty pm, everyone's buckled in and Captain Bob

guns whatever the aeroplane equivalent of an accelerator is. I believe it's called a throttle and sends that big berth of a plane down the runway and up into the air yuck. And the entire flight is smooth and everything is going swimmingly. That's until eleven thirty two pm when Captain Bob lowers the landing gear as part of his approach into Miami International Airport. So you know how planes have like three sets of wheels that come down, and there's one on either side where the wings are, and

then one up the front near the nose well. Each set of Wheels has a corresponding light that illuminates green on that giant airplane dashboard that indicates the flight crew that the gears are down and locked into place, and its first officer, burd that notices that one of the lights, the one for the nose gear, is not coming on. And while I'm no pilot, I'm pretty sure that all of those gears, particularly the nose one, are pretty crucial

when it comes to landing a plane. So they bring the gears back up into the plane and try bringing them down again, but no go, that nosegear light is still not on. So Captain Bob radio's air traffic control and explains what's happening, and they're like, okay, head on out to the airspace above the Everglades and just hang out up there for a bit so you're out of the way of oncoming air traffic until you can figure out what's going on. I'm sure they said that much nice,

ada more professionally, but thanks for nothing. And also I wonder how come the air traffic controllers couldn't vision confirm whether the gear was down for them or not. I reckon a set of km up binoculars could have done the trick, but who the fuck am I to say?

So Captain Bob flies the plane over to this area above the Everglades, sets the plane to autopilot at a height of two thousand feet and a speed of two hundred miles per hour, which is around three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, which is very fast, and he and the three amigos in the cockpit start troubleshooting this pretty significant problem. Captain Bob is pretty sure that that nose gear is down, but he can't know for sure, so he thinks the bulb of that little indicator light

is broken. So these four men are up there in the cockpit fussing around with this globe and trying to figure it out, until eventually Captain Bob asks Don Repo, the flight engineer, to head down to the area of the plane known as the hell hole, where he can get visual confirmation as to whether the gear is down

or not. Now, if I were Don Repo, I would have told Captain Bob to stick his gear stick up his a norse, because there'd be no fucking way that I'd go down there, because the hell hole is like, it's like a man hole that sits in the cockpit floor and you open it up and it goes down into this tiny space where there's this viewing device that allows you to see the positioning of the nose gear up close and personal, which no, thank you, But because Don Repo is professh he agrees and heads down to

the worst place a human could ever possibly want to go. But here's the thing. Unbeknown to anyone in that cockpit. When Captain Bob turned around to ask Don to go down to the hell hole, it's believed that he accidentally knocked the plane's yoke aka the steering wheel with his leg, which switched the plane from autopilot back to manual control.

I know so now. Because of the distraction of this fucking landing gear light bulb, coupled with the fact that the visibility was so poor because they're flying above the pitch blackness of the everglades and there's no lights around to guide them, no one realizes that the plane has started very smoothly descending, and because they were all talking and stuffing around with the globe, they missed the initial warning alert that the plane has dipped below the intended

two thousand feet that the autopilot was set to. It was only when First Officer Bert asked if they'd done something to the altitude that the last words were recorded on the cockpit voice recorder, which were Captain Bob's saying, quote, Hey,

what's happening here? I don't know if this is insensitive to say, I guess it's a blessing in some way that they would have only had a matter of moments to register what was happening before the plane hit the ground, because I mean, I don't know, maybe it's an even bigger blessing that those passengers didn't see it coming, because I feel like maybe the terror of knowing it's coming

is worse. I don't even know. So now we're back to around me night with Rob and Ray who were trying their best to get in there and pull passengers away from the plane. It's all so difficult because this is swampy, muddy ground, so bodies are sort of sinking into it, and like it's difficult to walk through let alone, you know, pick up a body and drag it through, and there's like twisted metal and shit everywhere. However, the saving grace here is that even though there was an

initial explosion, because they'd landed in this swampy area. The fire burned out quickly because of the dampness, and although the plane broke up into several pieces, the impact was less violent than you'd expect of a plane hitting the ground at a speed of three hundred and sixty five kilometers an hour, which was its last indicated speed before the crash, because the wet ground was soft, so it

sort of cushioned the impact a little bit. And it was for this reason and the fact that the plane was in a gradual descent as opposed to like a full on nosedive, that there were way more survivors than expected, and around half an hour after the initial crash, emergency workers arrived on the scene, and by sunrise on December thirtieth, nineteen seventy two, there were officially seventy seven survivors and

sadly ninety nine fatalities. Among the dead were First Officer Bert Stockstall, who was believed to have died on impact, and Captain Bob Loft, who apparently died at the scene. Don Repo was down in the hall hole at the time of the crash. He survived the initial impact but passed away in hospital days later, and Angelo Donadio, the fourth cockpit passenger, was injured, but amazingly went on to

make a full recovery. Eight of the ten flight attendants survived, and despite being covered in jet fuel and having sustained pretty serious injuries, they assisted in the rescue of many of the passengers and did very touching things like seeing Christmas carols to help those who were trapped stay alert. So a month after the crash, the death toll had

risen to one hundred and three. An investigation was carried out by the National Transportation Safety Board, which placed the fault of the crash down to pilot error within those final four minutes of the flight where the flight crew failed to detect the plane's descent, all because of this faulty light bulb worth twelve dollars, and as a final kick in the guts, the nose gear was down and locked. This, friends, is why I don't fucking fly. Now here's where the

story takes a bit of a spooky turn. If that whole first bit wasn't terrifying enough for you. So you know how when a plane crashes, they take every little piece of it and you know, try putting it back together in a giant warehouse to try and use it to make improvements that will make flying safer. Well, apparently there were many salvageable pieces that were still intact from this fifteen million dollar aircraft of flight four zero one, and it'd be pretty stupid to just chuck them out

with the recycling. So after being tested for safety, many of these parts were used in other Lockheed Al ten eleven planes in the Eastern Airlines fleet, and it was on those planes that staff and passengers began experiencing some very outlandish shit. Allow me to give you a rundown of some of them. Four months after the crash, Eastern Airlines aircraft number three one eight was in the process of doing their final checks prior to take off from

Newark Liberty International Airport headed to Miami. A senior flight attendant does a final passenger headcount and the numbers aren't adding up, so she goes through and counts again, and still she's coming up with one extra passenger, and she soon realizes that the additional passenger appears to be an Eastern Airlines captain who was sitting up in first class, and she's just like, oh, this must be another captain who's dead heading on this flight, which is basically when

an employee of the airline has to travel to another location where they needed on a particular flight, so they'll just jump on board one that's headed there. So she goes up to him and she's like, hi, captain, just checking if you're dead heading on this flight with us today, and if I can get your name and add it to our list, that'd be great. And then he slapped her on the ass and said, get me a cold one, sweet cheeks. That's not true. Well, maybe better, but it's

probably historically accurate, seeing as it was the seventies. Anyway, this captain is just staring vacantly ahead, not looking at her or acknowledging her, and she asks a couple more times and he continues to ignore her, so she eventually walks off, probably muttering fucking arrogant prick under her breath, and knocks on the cockpit door and explains the situation to the pilot and asks him to come out and see if this fellow captain will speak to him, because

maybe he only speaks to penis onus. I don't know. Anyway, So there was a group of passengers who were close by who'd been sitting there watching this situation unfold, as had a fellow flight attendant, and they're all watching as the pilot starts walking towards this very uncommunicative captain sitting

in first class, like what's gonna happen now? So the pilot sort of crouches down like they tell you to do when you're talking to a little kid, you know, like get down on their level so they don't feel

intimidated by you, blah blah. And when he looks up at the pilot, he gasps and falls backwards and he's all like stuttering and flustered, and he's like, what the fuck because he recognized that captain as his good friend Bob Loft aka Bob Loft, the captain who perished on Eastern Airlines flight for zero one and Spooky is still apparently.

Moments later, the pilot of that flight, the two flight attendants, and the handful of passengers that were watching this play out all reported seeing the seated captain just disappear, yes, disappear, So, as you can imagine, there was a bit of ensuing chaos because people don't just evaporate, but I'll tell you

who does. Ghosts and so the witnessing passengers are like, get me off this god forsaken plane, and the pilot and flight attendants, who, despite witnessing this all play out themselves, were trying to be rational and they're just telling everybody to calm down, and they order for the plane to be searched from top to bottom to try and see if they can find this disappearing captain who looks exactly

like Bob Loft. Perhaps it was David Copperfield wearing a Bob Loft costume and he was performing a magic trick. I'm not sure what the explanation is, but they're trying to find it. So they tell everyone to pipe the fuck down and start searching the plane for the disappearing pilot, ghost slash magician and spoiler alert. They never find him, so eventually the plane does take off, makes it to Miami, and the two flight attendants and the captain all go

and fill out incident reports about what they'd just seen. However, the reports mysteriously went missing, with Eastern Airlines denying they'd ever seen them. And this is a pattern that will continue because over the next couple of years, the hits just keep on rolling a flight attendant reported seeing the reflection of Don Repo's face in an oven door, and this was corroborated by two other flight attendants she'd called

over in a panic at the time. They all said that they saw Don's face and they also heard him say the words watch out for fire in this plane. And on that flight's return trip back to JFK Airport, an engine caught fire and had to be shut down

mid flight. Don was reported as being seen several times by staff on Eastern Airlines flights containing parts from flight four zero one, often warning staff about potential problems, like the time he was seen sitting in the cockpit and went on to warn the flight crew about a faulty electrical circuit, which when checked indeed was found to be faulty and then replaced. All the time that there in the cockpit heard knocking coming from under them in the

hel hole. Remember that trapdoor of terror that Don was sent down to check during the flight. Upon opening it, the pilot was greeted with Don's face looking up at him before he vanished right before his eyes. And apparently because word was getting around about Don's warnings, this pilot, who clearly had balls of whatever is stronger than steel went down into the hellhole to investigate and discovered a fault that very likely could have caused a significant problem

on that flight. Another pilot actually canceled the flight he was on when he found Bob Loft sitting in his captain's seat, reporting that he just completed the pre flight checks. Fuck.

A passenger on a flight to Phoenix had to be removed in a fucking straight jacket, which hands down one hundred percent would have been me because she was so hyspi y call when a man materialized out of thin air in the previously empty seat next to her, and when she started screaming, it disappeared just as quickly, and she described him as a captain with the hat and everything. And when she was shown a picture of Bob Loft, I want to say, Bob's your uncle, but that doesn't

sound right. I mean, I don't know how your nipples are varing right now, but I wouldn't be exaggerating to say that might have torn a hole through my bra This is terrifying. Now. Eastern Airlines denied all of these accounts, and word on the street or up in the air was that they pretty much put a gag order on all of their employees, and they were all forbidden from talking about these sightings, both publicly and amongst each other.

Good luck with that. But despite all of these denials, apparently they had all parts that were used from Flight four zero one removed from all of their planes in nineteen seventy four, and since then the sighting stopped. However, things didn't pan out so great for Eastern Airlines, with three major crashes in nineteen seventy four, seventy five, and

nineteen eighty five. And how's this. On September eleventh, nineteen seventy four, Oh my god, which was just gone fifty years shit, Flight two one two crashed just short of the runway at Douglas Municipal Airport in North Carolina, killing seventy two of the seventy eight passengers on board, and three of those passengers were James, Peter and Paul Colbert,

the father and older brothers of Stephen Colbert. You know, the guy that's got I don't know if it's one of those late shows or his a comedian, lovely guy. How tragic. One hundred and thirteen passengers and crew died on flight sixty six when it crashed into the runway at JFK Airport in June of nineteen seventy five, and ten years later, in January of nineteen eighty five, flight N nine eight zero crashed in Bolivia, killing all nineteen

passengers and ten crew on board. Eastern Airlines took their last flight in January of nineteen ninety one before they went couput. Look, things are different. We all know that air travel is the safest form of travel. I'm still not doing it. I always feel weird saying I hope you enjoyed that story when they're always such a bummer. Anyway, I'm off. I always enjoy doing these stories, and I hope that you enjoy listening to them. Please do not

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their new series on chronic health. So that is a very special and important one to listen to, whether you are suffering from chronic health problems or someone you love is. But until then, as always, take care of yourselves. Thank you for listening. Love you,