Tragic history repeats itself in waist-deep Glades muck

The date, Dec. 29, 1972, has stood out in South Florida's aviation history.

Never before had so many people died in a jetliner crash in South Florida. And never since that deadly day 23 years ago had the region experienced such a catastrophic aircraft accident.

Until Saturday afternoon, when a ValuJet DC-9 carrying 109 people plunged into the Everglades, apparently killing everyone aboard.

The ValuJet plane went down Saturday afternoon several miles north of the swampy site where Eastern Airlines Flight 401 from New York crashed on that Friday night, just before the new year more than two decades ago.

The 1972 toll: 98 bodies were retrieved from the wreckage, and three more people died at area hospitals; 75 survived.

The next most deadly flight in South Florida aviation history was a crash nearly 10 years earlier in the Everglades, when a Northwest Orient plane went down in February 1963, killing 43 people.

In 1972, Eastern's Lockheed L1011 left New York's Kennedy International Airport at 9 p.m., 20 minutes late, and was due to land at Miami International at 11:36 p.m.

The jet was on time for landing, in its descent, with its landing gear apparently down. But a cockpit signal registered a problem with one of the landing gears, so the crew decided to abort the landing and circle back around.

It turned out that the landing gear was down.

But as the crew became preoccupied with the warning, the plane -- accidentally knocked off autopilot -- descended gradually, unbeknown to any of the crew, from an altitude of 2,000 feet.

At 11:42 p.m., it dropped off of traffic controllers' screens, which meant it was less than 300 feet above the sawgrass terrain below. Seconds later, the jumbo jet bellied into the Everglades, about 19 miles northwest of the airport.

The chaotic search and rescue effort began in the West Dade darkness and continued throughout the night and well into the next day, hampered by the dense brush and waist-deep water accessible only by airboat or helicopter.

"I can still hear the screaming," wildlife officer Roy Carson said 10 years later. "The grass was high and you could still hear the screaming. But you couldn't tell where the people were."

Indeed, the conditions were much like those that the rescuers encountered Saturday, when they set upon the scene. Unlike in the Eastern crash, rescuers Saturday failed to not find anyone alive.

At the time, the Eastern crash was the second-worst accident in U.S. civil aviation history, and it led to new cockpit safety features, in particular, a new alarm to better warn pilots if they are about to strike land.

And for Eastern, the accident proved costly, with tens of millions of dollars paid out by the airline's insurers to survivors and relatives of victims.

In years afterward, Eastern retrieved usable parts from the doomed jet and installed them in other planes.

"Sightings" of the ghost of Second Officer Donald Repo abounded and eventually became the basis for a book, The Ghost of Flight 401, by John Fuller.

After the sightings, Eastern eventually removed all of the used parts from its planes.