A book has been published on the subject.
The Story Behind Scapegoat: A Flight Crew’s Journey From Heroes to Villains to Redemption by Emilio Corsetti III
The inspiration for this book came from a simple forum post. I had just watched the film Flight starring Denzel Washington. I’m a big fan of Robert Zemeckis. But he got so many things wrong in the first thirty minutes of that film that I wanted to throw something at the screen. I won’t go into detail, that would take too long, but I’ll give just one example. There is no magical lever that gives the pilot manual control. I still can’t understand how Zemeckis, who is a pilot, could make such a glaring, inexcusable error solely for what he thought would make for a dramatic moment. It’s sort of like a heart surgeon grabbing a pair of scissors to cut into a patient to begin a heart transplant.
So after sitting through one stupid scene after another, I decided to check out a pilot forum to see what other pilots thought of the film. That’s when I saw a post about TWA 841. The author of the post made a comment that the filmmakers should have told the real story of TWA 841 and how the crew got screwed over by Boeing and the NTSB.
Now I had heard of TWA 841. I remember thinking at the time that those pilots were toast. There’s no way they would be able to keep their jobs after the NTSB accused them of causing a near-fatal dive of close to 39,000 feet, and then attempting to cover up their actions by erasing the cockpit voice recorder. I assumed that the captain was selling real estate somewhere.
But I soon learned that not only was the crew not fired, but TWA and the pilot’s union fought for years to have the NTSB findings reversed. Now there’s a story.
So if Boeing and the NTSB got it wrong, what really happened? What connection is there between TWA 841 and a string of unexplained rollover accidents in 1990s?
As I dug deeper, a clear picture of what took place emerged. This story had all of the elements of a wrongful criminal conviction: erroneous eye witness testimony, false leads, investigator tunnel vision, manipulation of the evidence to fit a theory, etc. And at the very heart of the story was a conflict between the credibility of a flight crew against the integrity of the most popular aircraft in the world. Boeing and the NTSB won the first round. I hope this book sets the record straight and the crew is finally vindicated.