TWA Flight 841 Hoot Gibson
 

I was a pilot for TWA and have over 10,000 flight hours in the B-727 and remember this incident very well.


The amazing thing about the Boeing suggestion about pulling CB's and extending 2 degrees of trailing edge flaps in cruise was never...I'm mean never discussed much less contemplated during any one of my 10,000 hours on the 727. We constantly discussed ways of saving fuel, but never talked about extending flaps in cruise. Where Boeing ever dug that one up is beyond me.


If Boeing knew such a procedure would save fuel, why didn't they design a procedure so we could use it? It sounds to me like a big, fat CYA red herring to distract any litigation away from Boeing.
Hipexec

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.

No different to the rubbish broadcast on the Staines crash where thanks to the master of the guild who never flew the Trident, the only other pilot was management safety and the second officers were promoted to senior first officers and first officers.
As the one time 747 fleet chief and later a safety auditor said to me ..none of their programs are accurate.

NTSB "investigation" : B-727 N840TW April 4th 1979
 

Glorify NTSB April 4th
You can write to ntsb [email protected] : ask ntsb to RETRACT AAR-81-8 .
Ask : ? Who inside or outside NTSB audits for Scientific Misconduct ?

The Boeing Scenario as of 1979
("a positive system command" for the "slat" system ) , pg 8 - Step #1
Boeing's Scenario was vague, non-specific , alluding to "Slats".
But all Seattle Engineers accepted it as truth
-- and many airline pilots joyed in spreading the rumor
[see the early part of this Pprune thread ] .

NTSB's second false assertion : There has long been an unofficial procedure ,
that none of us TWA-pilots had ever heard about .
Later, that nstb IIC admitted that
NTSB NEVER found any airline pilot who had done his fabled "unofficial procedure".

CBS Reports , July 14 1983 10pm :
decades later.

Just above (Scott's mention of their Voice Recorder) --
in 1977 & 1978, within four month, NTSB had found two other CVR's unreliable or inoperative

The NTSB report states that this incident began at about 21:48, whilst flying at FL 390, and control was regained at about 21:49, at about 8000 feet. The aircraft then landed at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Michigan, at about 22:31.

The aircraft was fitted with a Fairchild Industries Model A-100 cockpit voice recorder, which only recorded up to 30 minutes. The allegations of CVR tampering aside, the NTSB was not going to find anything useful on the CVR given that 42 minutes passed between the start of the event and the landing (quite apart from any post-landing ground manoeuvring)! It's a largely moot point.