Ask any pilot old enough to remember TWA 841 and most will recite something along the following line: that's the one where the pilots were fooling around in the cockpit with flaps and slats and circuit breakers and almost crashed then tried to cover it up by erasing the CVR. That's the story I heard …
What happened to Malaysia Flight 370?
Like everyone else, I have been following the Malaysia Flight 370 story. I'm looking at the story through the prism of my work on TWA 841. I see many similarities, from accusations of crew involvement, to the repercussions to Boeing if something mechanical caused the plane to crash, to the mystery …
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Fear of flying
The story of TWA 841 and Hoot's battle to clear his name covers a time span of over twenty years. During that time there have been a number of fatal airline accidents. A number of these accidents are tangentially connected to TWA 841. For the passengers and crew aboard TWA 841, every fatal airline …
Spiral update
I wanted to give a quick update on my progress on the Spiral project. I completed the initial research stage at the end of last year. Since then I've been busy writing. I like to use the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle when trying to explain how the process works. Writing a book is very much like putting …
What if they crashed?
In the previous post, I talked about the discrepancy regarding the altitude TWA 841 recovered from the dive. The bottom line is that at the speeds they were descending they were at most a few seconds from spiraling right into the ground whether they were at 5,000 feet or 50 feet. At one point in the …
How close did they come?
One of the unanswered mysteries about TWA 841 concerns the altitude the plane reached before the recovery. The official record has always been that the plane recovered at approximately 4,900 feet. The last altitude shown by radar was 4,900 feet. The flight data recorder, which you can view for …
