Tragic history repeats itself in waist-deep Glades muck

Never before had so many people died in a jetliner crash in South Florida. And never since that deadly day 23 1/2 years ago had the region experienced such trauma.

Until Saturday, when a ValuJet DC-9 carrying 109 passengers and crew plunged into the Everglades, killing everyone aboard.

The ValuJet plane went down just a few miles from 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 found in 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, landing gear apparently down. But a 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 checking it out, the plane -- accidentally knocked off autopilot -- descended gradually, unbeknown to any of the crew.

At 11:42 p.m., after it dropped off traffic controllers' screens, the jumbo jet bellied into the Everglades, about 19 miles northwest of the airport.

The rescue effort began in the dark, and continued throughout the night. The conditions that rescuers faced then were similar to what people combing the ValuJet crash faced Saturday: waist-deep water, muck and dense brush.

Unlike in the Eastern crash, rescuers Saturday failed to find anyone alive.