Those who admit the existence of ghosts, at least in theory, consider them the souls of dead people. The dead, as a rule, are not their own death and are not able to rest. From such people we just have to expect that they will scare the late traveler, or even think of something worse: the mushroom picker will be lured into the swamp or the plane will be shown a false landing strip. But it turns out that not all ghosts want to harm people.
A step away from disaster
Now the Commission of the National Airport Authority of Thailand is investigating the incident with one of the flights of Thai International Airlines. On September 8, an Airbus A330-300, making a regular flight from Guangzhou, China, made a hard landing at Bangkok airport. During the landing, the front landing gear broke, the plane nodded and rolled off the runway. Onboard there were 287 passengers and 14 crew members.
Quite often, such accidents end in very serious consequences. Modern passenger liners, despite their apparent power, are very fragile machines. Rentals outside the runway often led to a fire and complete destruction of the car. The number of victims in such an accident can reach 100%.
This time everything worked out. The crew softened the landing as best they could, although the landing gear caught fire due to emergency braking. At the sight of a sheaf of sparks, the passengers panicked. Before the liner had time to stop, everyone rushed from their seats. There was a crush in the aisles. Nobody responded to the flight attendants' remarks and calls to keep order. As a result, several people were injured.
To the surprise of the crew, the panic stopped as suddenly as it began. People who were climbing over the heads of neighbors to the escape hatches suddenly sat down in their chairs and began to wait patiently. For the airline employees, this behavior turned out to be a mystery - they unanimously claim that they have completely lost control over the situation.
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Mysterious stewardess
But the passengers who gave evidence to the commission, on the contrary, thank the crew. As soon as the ominous word "fire" rushed through the salons and people rushed wherever they looked, a stewardess in Thai national costume suddenly appeared. She spoke very calmly to the crowd and immediately put things in order. Eyewitnesses recall that at the first sounds of her voice, thoughts of a fire disappeared by themselves.
Naturally, they decided to encourage the stewardess. Then there was a hitch - none of the passengers remembered the name of the savior on the breastplate, although many saw her in different salons. But - only during a panic, and not during a flight or after an evacuation.
Not one of the flight attendants who served the flight admitted to a perfect feat. Likewise, in none of them did the passengers recognize the "same" one. Moreover, none of the airport's surveillance cameras (as well as rescuers and firefighters) recorded flight attendants in national clothes - the entire crew was dressed in airline uniforms.
Official searches reached a dead end, and then the word was taken by experts of the otherworldly. They believe that the mysterious flight attendant is the ghost of a flight attendant who died on December 11, 1998 during the crash of flight # 261 of the same airline from Bangkok. Then the liner crashed into a rice field while trying to land at Surat Thani airport.
Then there were 146 people on board the Airbus A310-300, the landing gear could not be released. Suddenly the car pecked its nose and fell to the ground. A fire broke out immediately, the hull collapsed. Only three crew members and 42 passengers managed to escape. There could have been fewer casualties, but the passengers panicked: some pushed people away from the escape hatches, while others, on the contrary, refused to leave the cabin. According to eyewitnesses, one of the flight attendants pulled six people out of the fire, returned for the next one, but never appeared from the destroyed liner.
Takeoff on parole
On Sunday, July 22, 1973, a Boeing 707-321B crashed off the coast of Tahiti. The Pan American flight carried 79 passengers and crew.
Crew Commander Robert Evarts discovered that one of the cockpit glass panes had cracked. Evarts requested a center in New York on instructions. Soon a message arrived, according to which he was allowed to continue or stop the flight - at his own discretion.
In addition, the message said that in making the decision, the center relied on the experience of the commander and co-pilot, Lyle Havens. Evarts was 59 years old and had once served as a military pilot. Havens also served in the US Air Force during the war and was not much less experienced than the captain. Evarts decided to take off.
Eyewitnesses later recalled that the airliner took off from the runway heavier and lower than aircraft of this type. Two minutes later, the airport dispatcher heard a terrible crackle on the air, and when he looked towards the sea, he saw orange flashes on the water. It was a Boeing, which, after takeoff, gained an altitude of about 100 meters, and then unexpectedly collapsed into the input.
Boeing trap
At 22:13, rescuers and several private boats were already at the crash site. They fished 10 corpses out of the water and - to their great surprise - one seriously injured passenger. The plane sank at a depth of about 700 meters, so the flight recorders could not be found. There was no explosion and fire before hitting the water on board. Meteorological observations showed that there were no sharp gusts of wind at the time of takeoff either. The main version of the cause of the disaster was the cracked glass of the cockpit.
And then it turned out that the dispatcher of the New York center had sent an order to Papeete to interrupt the flight.
Fans of mysticism immediately recalled several more strange accidents with American planes in Polynesia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Each time, the crew either received the wrong coordinates for landing, or mysteriously made a mistake in calculating the distance to some mountain during takeoff.
By the way, during the war with the Japanese in the Pacific, the Americans more than once used a kind of radio traps, provoking mistakes by enemy pilots. Those landed on false signals on enemy airfields, lost their aircraft carriers, received false targets and the like. As if someone also drove Boeing into a trap, settling scores with American military pilots.
But the most interesting thing is the testimony of the only surviving passenger. Neil Campbell said that while waiting for takeoff, he buckled up and dozed off in his chair. Woke up from a jolt to the side when the plane began to climb. The neighbor - a middle-aged man of Asian appearance - told him: "This is the end, Yankees." At this time, Campbell clearly realized that the plane was falling, and took an "emergency" pose, which saved him.
However, no ticket was sold for the seat next to the lucky one. He couldn't have a neighbor. When the investigators told him about this, Campbell realized that he would most likely end up in a psychiatric hospital, and began to say that he simply realized that the plane was losing altitude, and took the position that the flight attendants showed before the flight.
The Curse of Flight 401
On December 10, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-1011 aircraft was landing at Miami airport. There were 176 people on board. Everything went on as usual, until the commander tried to release the chassis - the indicator light did not come on. The crew reported a malfunction and, at the command of the dispatcher, stopped approach, having occupied an altitude of 660 meters in the holding area.
Apparently, there had been problems with the electrician on this model of aircraft before, and the captain tried to remove the light bulb and check if it had burned out. He was right - the chassis came out fine. But, carried away by fussing with the capricious indicator, the crew commander touched the steering wheel hard, which led to the disabling of the autopilot. The liner began to slowly descend, but no one noticed.
At the last moment, the co-pilot managed to shout that the plane was already much lower than the set altitude, but the captain did not manage to lift it into the air. The car crashed into a swamp at full speed. 99 people died, including pilot Bob Loft and flight engineer Don Repo.
The airline decided to minimize losses and mysteriously received permission to dismantle the remaining aircraft components for parts. Subsequently, they were put on machines of the same type, and the oddities began.
Repo and Loft began to appear to the crew members of their former company at the most unexpected moments. They will warn about a fire in the engine, which will then happen, then they will predict a problem with the elevator.
Sometimes they entered into radio communication with the crew via internal lines. Once Repo scared the flight engineer so much that he flatly refused to fly. The deceased, for no reason at all, reported to his colleague that he had already carried out pre-flight training. On another occasion, Lofta, before takeoff, bullied the entire crew with a request to check the control panel and replace the burned out indicator. Then the whole team withdrew from the flight.
Of course, no recorders recorded such contacts, but in the company itself, the ghosts of the dead pilots are considered almost an official legend. And the management even announced at one time that it had taken out of service all the "damned" parts. 40 years after the disaster, of course, there are no such details left, but the story is still passed from mouth to mouth.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №46. Author: Boris Sharov