Quote:
Originally Posted by jimworcs
Er.. not really. The Eastern crash into the everglades was caused by pilot error due to loss of situational awareness. The role of the burnt out lightbulb was a minor event in a catelogue of errors made by the flight crew. The aircraft itself was fully functioning and had no defects which contributed to the crash. It was a controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) event, meaning the aircraft was fully under control at the time of the crash. The ghost stories are good though...  |
The aircraft was NOT under control at the time. For those not familiar with this one:
Dec 27,1972. Flight was getting ready to land in Miami at night. When the crew lowered the landing gear, the light for the nose gear didn't light up. The flight engineer (FE) went down below to check if the gear was down (the L-1011 has a set of sites in the avionics bay below the flight deck, and a trap door to get down there.) The FE was having trouble seeing, so the captain got up to help. But as he got up, he accidentally nudged his control column forward, which disengaged the auto-pilot, which had been keeping the plane flying level while they tried to figure things out.
Now for those of you keeping score so far, you know that this means that only the first officer was at the controls. But he was kind of wrapped up in things, and didn't notice the auto-pilot being off. Nor did he notice that the plane was not flying level, but rather on a 200 ft per minute descent. He finally did notice things were wrong, but unfortunately he came to that realization about 3 seconds before the crash.
Yes the crew screwed up, and they weren't paying proper attention. And yes there was the usual chain of events. But PHX is correct in that the first link in the chain was a burned out bulb.