THE STORY OF FLIGHT 401

On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from New York to Miami crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing 100 passengers and crew members aboard. It was the first aviation disaster of its kind involving a wide-bodied airliner.

Rescue teams and investigators who managed to retrieve the flight’s Black Box pieced together the events leading up to the deadly crash:

While the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar (a state-of-the-art aircraft at the time) was coming in for a landing, the landing gear indicator on the instrument panel which indicates that the nose gear is down and locked in position for landing, failed to light up. The pilots, not sure whether the landing gear had failed to deploy, or if the indicator bulb in the cockpit had simply stopped working, put the plane on autopilot to allow the crew time to sort out the problem.

While asking the second officer to check the landing gear through a viewing bay window, the captain inadvertently bumped into the control column and disengaged the autopilot, initiating a gradual descent of the airplane!

As the crew fiddled with a $5 light bulb, the airliner continued its deadly descent. An audio warning sounded, but the crew was so focused on the light bulb, they actually failed to hear it! There were at least four indications that the L-1011 was in trouble – the altimeter, vertical speed indicator, captain’s autopilot display, and an audio warning – but all went unnoticed.

By the time the first officer noticed something was wrong, it was too late! The plane crashed into the Everglades and disintegrated, its wreckage strewn over an area of 50 square kilometers.

The crash, horrific as it was, ultimately led to a major improvement in airline safety – the development of Crew Resource Management (CRM) in which the captain ensures that the monitoring of all indicators and warnings systems are delegated appropriately among the crew. (CRM, incidentally, helped Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger successfully land a bird-hit airplane in the Hudson River. While Sullenberger focused on landing the plane whose engines had gone dead, First Officer Jeff Skiles focused on the reference handbook that included instructions for emergency landing.)

But the story of Flight 401 contains a sobering lesson for the rest of us as well. – How often do we end up distracted by the relatively trivial, and lose sight of what is truly critical and important? And how often do important projects and endeavours end up ‘crashing’ simply because those ‘piloting’ them lost sight of what was actually important and ended up fiddling with the insignificant?

Let’s not “get lost in the thick of thin things”. And, like the warning systems in an aircraft, let us also learn to heed the voices of those trying to help and guide us.

Have a great week!

Team Anahat

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