Heim was in a situation many people probably fear but very few actually experience: an attack by an alligator.Īn estimated 5 million wild American alligators are spread out across 10 states in Southeast and beyond, including parts of North Carolina and even the extreme southeastern tip of Oklahoma. He was in the water, alone and face-to-face with an alligator.Īlligators sun themselves in Florida City, Miami-Dade County. But mostly what I felt was what I thought was a huge boat just slamming into me and just pulling me down.” I just felt like a blunt force object – like someone … swinging a baseball bat and just whacking my head. “I didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything. He was under no more than one minute when he felt something. He put on his wetsuit, mask, fins and snorkel and entered the water from the shore, not far from a restaurant along the riverbank. He had been there numerous times and was comfortable with plunging into its murky waters to find the teeth of extinct megalodons in the riverbed. So on a hot, sunny Sunday in Sarasota County, Florida, the 25-year-old Heim proceeded to the Myakka River on a spot about 45 minutes from the Gulf of Mexico. An unsuccessful attempt the day before to find any of them only fueled his obsession to find some on his next outing, he told CNN Travel recently. The crash spawned a number of books, films and other media, along with legends of ghost signtings involving crew members who were killed.Įastern Airlines eventually ceased operations early in 1991.Jeffrey Heim woke up on May 30, 2021, with one thing on his mind: Sharks. The crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401, along with other major air disasters around the same time, eventually led to a number of aircraft safety enhancements, including crew resource management, which has procedures for decision making in cockpits to try to eliminate human error.Īlso developed after the crash were ground proximity warning systems, which alert pilots if an aircraft is is immediate danger of flying into the gound or an obstacle. "Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew's attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed," it continued. Ultimately, the probable cause was determined to be "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the flight instruments during the final 4 minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground," the NTSB report said. In a June 1973 report NTSB investigators said it was possible that the altitude hold function on the autopilot was accidentally disengaged, causing the plane to gradually descend from the 2,000-foot altitude. The investigation into the crash took months. The jet carried 167 passengers to Miami from New York. ![]() Miami, Florida: A young survivor of an Eastern Airlines Tristar jet which crashed in the Everglades near Miami is helped from a helicopter by hospital personnel in Miami. Fourteen people suffered burns, while 17 had only minor injuries and didn't need to be hospitalized, the NTSB report said. The helicopters had trouble finding the wreckage but Marquis used his headlamp to help signal them, as he continued to pull survivors from the wreckage.ĭozens of people were airlifted to local hospitals from the scene. Coast Guard had been quickly notified by the tower at MIA and had helicopters airborne almost immediately from their station in Opa-locka. "I'm one person in the midst of all this," Marquis told NBC News back in 2007. A flash fire also developed from sprayed fuel.Īlmost immediately, airboat operators who saw the flash responded to the area.īud Marquis, who was out hunting frogs with a friend, was the first to arrive and found a scene of chaos, with survivors struggling in the swampy wreckage. Seconds later, the plane crashed into the ground at 227 mph.Īfter the impact the aircraft disintegrated, scattering wreckage over an area approximately 1,600 feet long and 300 feet wide. ![]() "We're still at two thousand right?" the first officer asked, and the captain immediately exclaimed "Hey, what's happening here?" ![]() "We did something to the altitude," the first officer remarked, and the captain's reply was "What?" The flight path of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in its final moments.
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