Eastern Air Lines Flight 980
Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 was a scheduled international flight from Asunción, Paraguay, to Miami, Florida, United States. On January 1, 1985, while descending towards La Paz, Bolivia, for a scheduled stopover, the Boeing 727 jetliner struck Mount Illimani at an altitude of, killing all 29 people on board.
The wreckage was scattered over a large area of a glacier covered with snow. Over the decades, several search expeditions were only able to recover a small amount of debris, and searches for the flight recorders were unsuccessful. The accident remains the highest-altitude controlled flight into terrain in commercial aviation history.
Accident
Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 had departed President Stroessner International Airport in Asunción, Paraguay, at 17:57 on January 1, 1985, with nineteen passengers and a crew of ten. The passengers were from Paraguay, South Korea and the United States. Among them was the wife of Arthur H. Davis, the then-U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, William Kelly, a director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay, and two Eastern pilots flying as passengers.At 19:37 the flight crew of Flight 980 told air traffic controllers at El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Bolivia, that he estimated landing at 19:47. The crew was cleared to descend from. At some point after this exchange, the aircraft veered significantly off course for unknown reasons, possibly to avoid weather. The accident occurred from runway 9R at El Alto airport.
On-site investigation
In October 1985, the U.S National Transportation Safety Board selected Greg Feith, an air safety investigator, to lead a team of U.S. investigators and Bolivian mountain guides to conduct an on-site examination of the wreckage of Flight 980, which had come to rest around. Feith conducted the on-site investigation with the goal of finding the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, as well as retrieving other critical information; however, because the wreckage was spread over a vast area and covered by of snow, he and his team could not locate either of the "black boxes". He did retrieve various small parts of the aircraft cockpit, official flight-related paperwork, and some items from the passenger cabin.Discovery of wreckage
Over the years, the debris moved along with the glacier and eventually emerged enough that climbers were able to uncover wreckage in 2006. No bodies were found, though various personal effects of the passengers were recovered. Local climbers believed it was only a matter of time before bodies, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder emerge from the ice.On 4 June 2016, after one of the warmest years on record in the area, human remains and a piece of wreckage labelled "CKPT VO RCDR" were recovered by a team of five in the Andes Mountains including Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner of Operation Thonapa who recovered six large orange metal segments and several damaged pieces of magnetic tape. After review by the NTSB, the pieces turned out to be the housing components of the flight recorders but holding no data themselves, while the tape turned out to be a home recording of an unrelated TV program.