707 Image: www.flickr.com/people/army_arch/
This is the story of american airlines flight 1. If youre from the states you may have flown on american airlines flight 1. Today american airlines flight 1 is a flight between JFK and LAX and its flown by a 777, but back in 1962 american airlines flight the same route was flown by a boeing 707. I didnt plan for this to happen, it just happened by chance but i'm writing this on the first of march 2021 and this incident takes place on the 1st of march 1962. Exactly 59 years ago. I just thought that was interesting. So on that day the 707 was prepped for its transcontinental flight, the plane had 95 people on board, 8 crew members and 87 passengers. The crew studied their departure, they had to thread the needle on this one, they coudlnt just power up and climb out, there were noise restrictions in and around new york, so they had to keep the power at a setting where they had a healthy safety margin but quiet enough where they followed the rules.
So with that they taxied to runway 31L and they were cleared for an IFR flight to los angeles. The controller added “ In the interest of noise abatement do not delay turn to heading two niner zero”. Flight one was ready to go. They advanced power and the controller watched as the plane took off about 5000 feet down the runway. As the plane started its climb the pilots put the plane into a gentle left bank, as the controller had told them to. The controller turned their attention back to their scope , they asked flight one to contact departure control. The plane started another left turn and the controller monitored the plane's progress on the scope. The departure controller watched as the plane made the second left turn onto 140 degrees. The controller gave out radar vectors as they did for all planes,but the radar blip that represented flight 1 went off the scopes, and it never reappeared. Flight one had crashed into the shallow waters of jamaica bay in new york. No one on board survived.
On the ground people had a great view of what the plane went through the takeoff was normal the plane climbed and started the noise abatement procedure by turning to the left, it then rolled out of its left turn to begin its next left turn, The left turn served two purposes, it would take the plane away from crowded areas thus reducing the noise and also it would keep the plane out of the way of planes landing or taking off near laguardia. the second left turn started out like any other turn but the turn kept getting sharper and sharper. Soon the plane was in a 90 degree right bank and the nose dropped. The witnesses watched on as the plane entered a near vertical dive and that's how the plane impacted the water.
Maybe something went wrong with the left turn the investigators of the civil aviation board looked for signs of incapacitation in the pilots. Tests disproved that, the pilots were alright. But these investigators had an uphill battle ahead of them, part of the flight data from the flight data recorder was unrecoverable as the foil that housed the data was torn very badly. But the flight data did tell them something, most of the flight had been nothing but ordinary. The takeoff and the initial climb all looked exactly as it should for a 707. But as the plane entered its second turn the heading data shows that the rate of change of the heading was erratic, in its final moments the plane was turning faster than it should. Soon the data engraved in the metal foil of the flight data recorder, stopped making sense all together, it suggested that the plane went through turns that should be impossible for a 707. This was because of the high bank angle of the plane in its final moments. The gyroscopes in the plane just couldnt work in the extreme bank that plane was in. The data backed up what the eye witnesses had seen, Flight 1 had dropped out of the skies of new york.