Eastern Airlines Flight 980

 

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 struck Mount Illimani at an altitude of 19,600 feet (6,000 m), killing all 29 people on board.

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 searches for the flight recorders were unsuccessful. The accident remains the highest-altitude controlled flight into terrain in commercial aviation history.

Accident

Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 had departed President Stroessner International Airport in Asunción, Paraguay, at 17:57 on January 1, 1985, with a passenger contingent of nineteen and a crew of ten. The passengers were from Paraguay, South Korea and the United States. Among them were the wife of the then-U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, Arthur H. Davis, and two Eastern pilots flying as passengers.

At 19:37 the flight crew of Flight 980 (Captain Larry Campbell, First Officer Kenneth Rhodes and Flight Engineer Mark Bird) told air traffic controllers at El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Bolivia, that he estimated landing at 19:47. The crew was cleared to descend from 25,000 to 18,000 feet (7,620 to 5,486 m). At some point after this exchange, the aircraft veered significantly off course for unknown reasons, possibly to avoid weather. The accident occurred 25 miles (22 nmi; 40 km) 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 20,098 feet (6,126 m). 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 20 to 30 ft (6 to 9 m) 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 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 emerge from the ice.

On 4 June 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 4 January 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 that what had been found was the "cockpit voice recorder rack" and the "flight data recorder pressurized container assembly", both of which are exterior pieces of the flight recorders that surround the data recording mechanisms in either device but do not hold data themselves. The promising spool turned out to be ¾-inch U-Matic videotape that "when reviewed was found to contain an 18-minute recording of the 1966 "Trial by Treehouse" episode of the television series I Spy, dubbed in Spanish".

Notes

 The aircraft was a Boeing 727-200 Advanced ("Boeing 727-200 Adv") model; Boeing assigns a unique code for each company that buys one of its aircraft, which is applied as an infix to the model number at the time the aircraft is built, hence "727-225" designates a 727-200 built for Eastern Airlines (customer code 25).