Note: this is just a personal project and is not to compete with Admiral Cloudberg’s Plane Crash Series.
On April 4th 1979, one of the most extraordinary events in aviation history occurred on Trans World Airlines flight 841. While cruising at 39,000 feet enroute to Minneapolis from New York, the Boeing 727 suddenly rolled over and plummeted over 34,000 feet in just 63 seconds before the pilots were able to save the plane and make a miraculous landing, saving the lives of all 89 onboard. Initially hailed as heroes, all that changed when the investigators found 21 minutes of the Cockpit Voice Recorder blank.
Despite never inspecting the recorder for deficiencies, from that moment on the investigators had their fingers pointed at the pilots for causing this near-accident. The subsequent investigation spiraled down into a rabbit hole and produced a very ludicrous probable cause, leading to the flight crew’s lifelong struggle to clear their names and an enduring mystery that continues to this day as to what actually caused TWA flight 841 to nearly crash.
In the early 1960s, following the success of Boeing’s first jet-airliner, the Boeing 707, several major U.S. airlines, American, Eastern, and United, requested a jet airliner that could serve smaller cities, land on shorter runways, and carry fewer passengers. Eastern Airlines wanted the plane to have a third engine so it could launch non-stop overwater flights from major U.S. cities to the Caribbean. A three-engine plane also provided better takeoff performance at high elevation airports such as Denver and could takeoff with a lower ceiling and visibility requirements than a twin engine plane. The plane would be called the Boeing 727, Boeing’s only trijet. The 727 first flew in 1963 and entered service the following year. The first model, the 727–100, could carry 130 passengers. In 1967, Boeing developed a stretched version of the 727, the 727–200 which had a 20 foot longer fuselage that allowed it to carry up to 50 more passengers, making it more popular, and had the same wingspan.
To improve roll control at low speeds, inboard and outboard ailerons were added, and the outboard ailerons automatically locked out when the flaps were retracted to prevent over controlling and twisting of the wings at higher speeds. The 727 went on to be a very successful jet airliner with 1,832 produced from 1962 to 1984, the most produced jet airliner until the 1990s when the Boeing 737 surpassed it. In 1979 the 727 was the most popular passenger plane in the world with 1,700 flying.
Trans World Airlines, commonly known as TWA, one of America’s top airlines at the time and the world’s third largest airline in terms of passenger-miles behind Aeroflot and United, ordered 35 727–100s with the first one entering service in 1964 and the last one was retired in 1993; 61 727–200s were ordered with the first one entering service in 1968 before retiring it in 2000, a year before TWA ceased operations, thus was one of the last planes that TWA operated. During its time at TWA, the 727s were used for domestic and European routes.
On the evening of April 4th 1979, a 13-year-old TWA Boeing 727–100 was preparing to depart New York’s JFK airport for Minneapolis, Minnesota with 89 people onboard: 82 passengers including two infants, 4 flight attendants and the 3 pilots. The plane would be operating as TWA flight 841. The Captain was 44 year old Harvey Glenn “Hoot” Gibson, a former stunt pilot who was a 16 year veteran at TWA with 15,710 total hours and 2,597 hours in the Boeing 727. He had a clean record, was considered a true professional, and well respected amongst pilots. The First Officer was 40 year old Jess Scott Kennedy (known as Scott) who had been flying for TWA for 10 years. He flew in the U.S. Army for five years, flying cargo across the Pacific into Vietnam before going into the airlines. He started as a 727 Flight Engineer in 1967 before upgrading to First Officer and had over 10,000 hours with 8,336 hours in the 727. The Flight Engineer was 37 year old Second Officer Gary Banks, a five year Air Force veteran who had been flying for TWA for 10 years and had over 4,100 hours with 1,186 in the 727.
The flight crew of TWA flight 841 was on the second day of a three day trip that began in Los Angeles the day before, flying to Phoenix, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Wichita, Kansas City, Chicago, before arriving in Columbus that night. They departed for Philadelphia the next morning, and then flew to New York. A few hours later they arrived at the plane, registered as N840TW to fly on a three hour flight to Minneapolis. Hoot and Scott had flown together before but this was the first time that they had flown with Gary, however by the end of their second day the three had known each other well. The night prior at the crew hotel in Columbus, Scott and Gary talked about military stalls and how to recover from them.
Captain Gibson would be the Pilot Flying while First Officer Kennedy would be the Pilot Not Flying and handling radio communication. The weather that night was overcast with light winds and light rain. This trip was Hoot’s first time as a 727 Captain in 3 months after breaking his ankle and asked Scott and Gary to keep an eye on him and point out if he did anything wrong; before this flight he had accumulated almost 22 hours on the 727 in a 90 day period. As it turns out, Hoot wasn’t just a TWA Captain, he had a second aviation job (not known to anyone at TWA because he wasn’t supposed to be working outside his job at TWA) based in Las Vegas to catch drug cartels and occasionally would pose as a pilot to them; when he leaped forward to catch a drug dealer, he missed and broke his ankle.
The plane took off on its last flight of the day from JFK at 8:25 pm local time, one hour and 30 minutes behind schedule, and climbed to 35,000 feet which they reached at 8:54. Scott did a ground speed check shortly after reaching 35,000 in which he would measure the distance between two points and how long it took them to reach the second point to determine their velocity. He concluded they had a 100-knot headwind, reducing their groundspeed, therefore lengthening the flight and burning more fuel.
Lead flight attendant Mark Moscicki knocked on the cockpit door and handed the pilots their meals. At 9:25 pm, once they were finished eating and while in radio contact with Toronto Center, Kennedy requested to climb to 39,000 feet, the maximum altitude they could fly at based on the aircraft’s gross weight, which was granted and commenced a slow climb. They were then handed off to Cleveland Center and reported reaching 39,000 feet at 9:38 pm. He then commenced a ground speed check after leveling off. The flight proceeded normally on autopilot (Heading and Altitude hold engaged) at a speed of 252 KIAS (Knots Indicated Airspeed) which based on the present atmospheric conditions was Mach 0.80 (80% of the speed of sound). The sky was clear, the stars and half-moon were bright, and Hoot could start to see the lights of Chicago. But beneath them were cloud layers below 1,000 feet and poor weather.
The following events are based on the sworn testimonies given by the pilots after the flight as the Cockpit Voice Recording that was available to the investigators began over 45 minutes later. At 9:47pm and 34 seconds, just under 90 minutes after takeoff while over Saginaw, Michigan as Scott was doing the ground speed check, Hoot was getting charts for Minneapolis from his flight bag on the left side of the floor when he sensed a high frequency vibration in his feet, followed by a slight buzzing sound and the plane began to buffet two seconds later. He quickly realized that this wasn’t turbulence and had to do with the airplane. He looked at Scott to see if he felt the vibration but he was still doing the ground speed check and didn’t appear to notice. Hoot pulled his seat forward and saw no warning lights but saw the nose of the plane yawing to the right, pausing, and then yawing right again. He looked at his Attitude Indicator and saw the plane was banking roughly 20 degrees to the right and the autopilot was moving the control column (yoke) to the left to level the wings. This had no effect and the plane continued banking further to the right. Hoot quickly disconnected the autopilot and applied full left aileron which also had no effect. He then got his feet onto the rudder pedals to apply left rudder; he recalled that as he did so something didn’t feel right — he didn’t know exactly what it was but all he knew it felt weird.
By this point Captain Gibson was applying full left aileron and full left rudder to level the wings but the plane was not responding and was banking further to the right. On most planes, creating an engine asymmetry would help counter the roll but on the 727 the engines are located at the tail so creating an asymmetry wouldn’t help. He reduced the throttles to idle to slow the plane down. The plane then yawed severely to the right and the bank increased to 35°; it started rolling back to wings level but yawed right again and began losing altitude. Hoot Gibson yelled “Hold on! I think she’s going over!” as the 727 had rolled almost completely on its side. Scott Kennedy felt himself being forced towards the window and realized they were rolling over. Everybody on the plane knew that something was terribly wrong.
Less than 20 seconds after sensing any trouble, TWA 841 rolled upside down and entered a steep spiral dive. Hoot hollered to Scott: “Get em’ up!” which meant pull the spoiler handle to deploy the spoilers (also known as speedbrakes), panels on the wings to slow the plane down and improve roll control. He repeated: “Get em’ up!” but Scott didn’t understand what he was supposed to do so Hoot took his hand off his control column and deployed them. This too had no effect.
The 727 plummeted as much as 80° nose down towards the ground at a rate of over 34,000 feet per minute (at least 560 feet per second); the plane did two 360° rolls! The airspeed dramatically increased to 475 knots indicated, well above the speed where structural damage could occur, and the altimeters dramatically unwinded from 39,000. In the cabin, a stewardess in first class was thrown to the floor and a seated passenger grabbed her arm. The 89 people onboard were enduring 3 Gs, three times the force of gravity, forcing them into their seats and some started graying out — losing their vision due to the blood draining from their heads which is one step below blacking out where you lose consciousness; at least one passenger blacked out. Only military and stunt pilots would be experiencing these G-forces. One woman was in the rear lavatory during the dive and a first class passenger, Holly Wicker, saw her newborn baby’s face turning blue and had to give her mouth-to-mouth, supposedly injuring Holly in the process due to the G-forces. Seeing how far down they were pointed and the ground lights through the clouds, Flight Engineer Gary Banks said to himself: “My God, it’s all over. I wonder what it’s going to feel like to hit?”
The Air Traffic Controller in Cleveland saw the plane falling fast on his radar scope and radioed twice: “Trans World eight-forty-one, Cleveland.’’ But there was no response; no distress call from the plane was sent. Captain Gibson was doing everything humanly possible to save his plane: applying full left aileron, then full right aileron, left rudder, right rudder, full elevator up, full elevator down, spoilers retracted, spoilers deployed, but nothing he did made any difference and the plane continued to spiral towards the ground… seemingly with a mind of its own. He briefly considered deploying the №1 engine thrust reverser but decided against it. A number of passengers believed these were the last moments of their lives; other passengers believed that they could survive: one passenger in Row 11 said “You can do it. You can do it. You can pull it out!” During the dive, the Mach limit of the 727 was broken. As a plane approaches the speed of sound, a shockwave forms at the wing root which can lead to the flight control surfaces becoming ineffective and making recovery from the dive impossible.
At roughly 15,000 feet when they were less than 30 seconds from smashing into the ground, in a desperate attempt to save the plane, Scott Kennedy reached his hand out and held it over the landing gear handle to which Hoot saw it and said, “Yeah, gear down” and he put the gear down. In Kennedy’s mind, he believed that putting the gear down would change the attitude of the airplane and get it flying again. They knew that if putting the gear down proved fruitless, they were dead. When the gear came down, there was a loud bang, almost like an explosion and everyone heard metal tearing off the plane. Only a few seconds after dropping the landing gear, Hoot managed to regain control of the airplane. He rolled the wings level and felt the elevators respond as pulled back on his control column but knew that if he pulled back too hard he could rip the wings off. At an altitude to be later determined (the final report says 5,000 feet), TWA flight 841 came out of its dive — 63 seconds had passed since the plane entered its dive. Hoot recalled during the pullout that they passed through a cloud or fog layer over a storage lot. As the plane came out of its dive, the G-forces increased even more and the passengers and crew endured a 6 G pull out. Gary Banks tried his best but he blacked out and fell face first onto the center console. The woman in the lavatory fell out onto the cabin floor and had nearly blacked out. A passenger noticed that the cocktail sitting on his armrest he ordered earlier hadn’t spilled a single drop during the dive.
The 727 climbed rapidly through the clouds or fog to 9,500 feet and reached 50° nose up in which Hoot pushed the throttles forward, retracted the spoilers and used the Moon as a visual reference. Gary regained consciousness and said “Watch your attitude and speed. You’re in a 45 degree bank to the left. Airspeed’s decreasing.”
Hoot pushed the control column forward — creating negative G-forces which forces you up — and the plane descended to 3,000 feet before he pulled the 727 into a climb again and they leveled off at 10,000 feet. The plane was shaking so hard that he couldn’t read the instruments and Gary had to shout in order to help him. He reported that they had lost one of two hydraulic systems, System A (this was caused by the right main gear overextending and rupturing the cooling line for the hydraulics), there was a failure flag for the lower rudder yaw damper (a 727 like the 747 has two rudders — a split rudder), and they had Gear Unsafe lights for their main gears and nose gear. The loss of System A hydraulics meant they had no lower rudder, lower yaw damper, trailing edge flaps, outboard flight and ground spoilers, and nose wheel steering.
Cleveland Center called again “Trans World eight-forty-one, Cleveland.”
This time the pilots responded. “TWA’s 841; go ahead.”
“Yes, sir, looks like you’re on a southbound heading, sir, ah, verify your intentions.”
The pilots knew they could not continue to Minneapolis in this condition, they had to land at the nearest suitable airport. Hoot requested vectors to the Detroit Metropolitan airport 60 miles southeast which had a TWA facility and most importantly — better weather. The weather at Detroit was scattered clouds at 800 feet, 7 miles visibility, light snow and winds 320° at 8 knots. Even though Saginaw and Flint airports were minutes away, the weather there was worse and would require doing an instrument approach which Hoot did not want to do due to controlling difficulties.
Hoot elected that he would fly the plane and handle the radios while Gary and Scott Kennedy went through emergency checklists. Hoot made an announcement over the PA:
“ Ladies and Gentlemen, I think it is apparent that we’ve had a slight problem. We’re going to be pretty busy up here for the next few minutes. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
This was a great understatement, but he had to keep everybody calm as not even he knew if they would survive.
In the cabin some of the oxygen masks had dropped. Many passengers were silent, those who weren’t were praying — some said if there were parachutes they would jump out. The Cleveland controller kept TWA 841 on his frequency even after it left his airspace as he knew by the stress in Hoot’s voice that what they were dealing with was serious and making them change frequencies would likely increase the stress. As the plane neared Detroit they were handed off to the Detroit tower controllers. They would be landing on Runway 03 Left which was 8,500 feet long and the fire trucks were rolled out. When Gary manually cranked the nose gear down, they got a green light for it and the buffeting ceased. However, they didn’t have green lights for the main gears and they could have ripped off the plane. When Scott and Gary extended the flaps to the 5° position using the alternate flap extension, the plane banked hard to the left.
“Stop what you’re doing!” shouted Hoot, “I’m having control problems.”
Scott brought the flaps up but because they used the alternate flap extension the slats remained permanently extended. The plane was banking to the left which required Hoot to apply full right aileron just to keep the plane level. He found that below 200 knots the plane had a tendency to roll to the left and they had to land without flaps which meant they would have to approach at a speed of 220 knots (407 km/h), 90 knots faster than a normal approach.
Some frightened passengers and flight attendants believed that on landing the plane would break apart in a trail of sparks and flames. Since the pilots were unsure about the status of their two main gears, they overflew the runway and asked the controllers to verify if the main gears were down to which the controllers observed the nose and left gears were down, but the right gear appeared to be dangling.
On final approach, Hoot overflew the runway threshold at a speed of 217 knots and at 10:31pm, 42 minutes after recovering from the dive, the 727 touched down on its left main gear onto the wet and slick runway at a speed of roughly 187 knots. The left gear held, followed by the nose gear; Hoot held the right gear off the runway for as long as possible until he could no longer do so. It touched down and the gear doors dragged on the runway which produced a trail of sparks but the gear held. Hoot deployed the thrust reversers, applied the brakes and said “Stop, you son of a bitch! Stop!”
As the plane slowed down and when certain everything held, he used differential power and braking to steer because he had no nose wheel steering to taxi the plane off onto a high-speed turnoff where the emergency vehicles were. Once off the runway he set the brakes, ordered Gary to start the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), and shut the engines down. In the cabin, the passengers applauded once they had stopped. Fire crews sprayed foam around the main landing gears.
A mechanic plugged into the maintenance intercom to talk to the pilots and told them there was a fuel leak on the left side. Hoot told the flight attendants the passengers shall be evacuated via the air stair door at the rear as they would probably only be more grief stricken than they already were if they used the evacuation slides. He left everything in the cockpit as it was to help the investigators figure out what happened. After the pilots deplaned, several passengers congratulated them for getting them down safely while Hoot shook a few hands. There were only 8 minor injuries. Upon inspection, the right main gear had almost collapsed, intriguingly, the №7 slat on the right wing was missing, mud and a tree branch were wedged into the right landing gear, and hydraulic fluid was observed leaking from the lower rudder actuator. The damage to the airplane also consisted of the #6 flight spoiler missing, #4 flight spoiler, right-hand inboard flap carriage, the landing gear doors and mechanisms damaged with the right main gear side brace and actuator support beam broken, the lower fuselage skin wrinkled fore and aft of the wing attach point, and the right outboard aileron had about an inch and a half of free play, despite the flaps being retracted, due to a fractured bolt on the aileron-actuator caused by metal fatigue but the left outboard aileron was locked.
Miraculously, despite breaking the 727 Mach limit, this was the only damage to the aircraft. The tree branch made Hoot believe they had touched the ground, however as he recalled they passed over a storage lot a more likely explanation is that they flew so low that ground effect forced mud and branches skyward. But this means they came within 100 feet of hitting the ground. Shortly after midnight, while his memory was still fresh, two inspectors of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) met with Hoot to take his statement of what happened. For a short time the pilots were declared heroes and Hoot received the same amount of praise and attention that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger would receive almost 30 years later.
From this moment on, the investigators of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) believed that somehow the slat had extended by itself in flight and caused the plane to roll over and dive then at 8,000 feet, as they discovered after locating it, the canoe fairings and flight spoiler in a field near where the plane recovered from its dive, the slat ripped off the wing and allowed the pilots to recover from the dive. (The debris field showed these pieces tore off at roughly the same time.) If a hidden fault with the 727 was to blame then all 1,700 727s in service could be grounded. This would be disastrous and no manufacturer, Boeing included, would ever want this to happen. The following month, an engine came off an American Airlines DC-10 while taking off from Chicago. The plane rolled over and crashed, killing 273 people. The cause was due to unapproved procedures in removing and attaching engines for maintenance reasons by several U.S. airlines including American. The FAA grounded the DC-10s for just over a month, something which the manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, said was “unnecessary”. The reputation of the DC-10 never recovered after this crash.
As TWA 841 didn’t crash, Trans World Airlines wanted to get the plane repaired and put back into service, but nobody at TWA, Airline Pilots Association (ALPA (the pilot’s union)) and the NTSB ever suggested preserving N840TW for further investigation and testing to determine the definitive cause of the upset. You would think that if a plane during the cruise phase of flight, where statistics show only 8% of crashes occur, fell over 30,000 feet — coming within seconds of crashing — and the plane was all intact that you would want to carefully examine every part of the plane that could cause a loss of control to figure out what happened to prevent a possible fatal recurrence? Well, despite the investigators being very lucky to have an intact plane, that didn’t happen and mechanics went in to replace and repair the damaged parts. In doing so, any valuable evidence which could provide clues to assist the investigation was lost. 12 days after the upset the preliminary repairs were completed and the plane was flown to Kansas City for more extensive repairs.
At the time, commercial airliners had a very primitive Flight Data Recorder (FDR): it used foil that only recorded Altitude, Heading, Airspeed, and Vertical acceleration or G-trace, which provided the investigators very little to explain the cause of the upset.
When the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) was analyzed, 21 minutes of the 30 minute recording was blank — the recording should have begun 12 minutes after they recovered from the dive — and the only recorded conversations were after they taxied off the runway. These are some recorded conversations between the pilots:
“Did you feel kind of helpless in that seat back there?” someone asked Gary.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” he responded.
Gary said “If it happened here, hard to see what’s happening. You guys were trying to pull it up like —”
There were other conversations between the pilots and TWA Operations (Ops).
The last discernible words on the tape was TWA Ops saying “Okay, you can sign off then,” followed by an electrical interruption with one pilot asking twice “Detroit ramp do you read?”.
Although incriminating today, in 1979 it was essentially a standard procedure at the end of every flight to erase the Cockpit Voice Recording if everything was routine for privacy reasons. When CVRs were first introduced in the 1960s, pilots felt this was an invasion of privacy as the Flight Data Recorder told the investigators what happened, why did they need to know what was said? The Cockpit Voice Recorder often tells the investigators why it happened if the pilots died and helps them better understand what happened in the cockpit to prevent a recurrence; ALPA declared the CVR can be used to prove the pilots handled an emergency situation very professionally. But to the pilots, the recording of thousands of routine flights being preserved is like saying that the manager installed a recording device in the lunchroom or breakroom at your workplace to know what you and your colleagues are discussing.
To erase the CVR, one has to push the erase button and hold it for at least two seconds to prevent any accidental erasures. The truth is that there wasn’t anybody at the end of a flight who would pull the tape to find any embarrassing comments by the pilots, and the recording would be quite short — just 30 minutes. The only time someone would listen to a CVR would be after a crash or serious incident.
Eight days after the incident a hearing was held in which there were 11 men representing five parties: the NTSB, FAA, ALPA, TWA, and Boeing. Hoot Gibson — with ALPA attorney Ken Cooper and ALPA representatives Captain Marshall Hydorn and TWA/ALPA accident investigation committee chairman Captain Jim McIntyre — was informed that the CVR showed evidence of erasure and questioned as to why 21 minutes were missing. He stated that while he did routinely erase the CVR after every flight, he did not do so on this occasion. He was questioned about other things by several investigators to the point that Hoot felt this was a cross-examination by a hostile prosecutor in a criminal case, not a forum to gather information that may lead to answers in determining the probable cause. Scott and Gary were then questioned about events during the upset and if they erased or saw someone erase the CVR to which they said no for the latter. Overall, a lot of the questions asked were to rule out any possibility of mechanical failure with the flaps and slats.
After the hearing the flight crew were no longer declared heroes, and this was the last time the investigators ever directly talked to the pilots, the only people who could say what happened, about the upset and the events leading up to it; newspaper stories erroneously printed out that Hoot had admitted to erasing the CVR. Even though the investigators understood the “CVR would not have contained any contemporaneous information about the events that immediately preceded the loss of control” as it tapes over itself after 30 minutes, the fact the plane came within a few seconds of crashing only for the pilots to erase it caused the NTSB to become so convinced that pilots of TWA 841 wanted to hide something. From that moment on they pointed their fingers at them for causing the upset and discounted their sworn testimonies… even the passengers' testimonies which supported the pilots’ version of events.
Scott Kennedy said that the three of them were so busy flying the “very sick” plane to Detroit and going through the emergency checklists that there was no time for anyone to think of devising a cover story. He found it irritating that the investigators would ever think they wanted to hide something because they were working to save the plane and everyone onboard and get them down safely. In Hoot Gibson’s mind, the CVR was only used in a crash: “If they want to know what was going on in the cockpit, all they have to do is ask me.” The investigator-in-charge, Leslie Dean Kampschror (1932–1995), an Air Force and Vietnam veteran but wasn’t an airline pilot nor had a multi-engine rating, said: “This is the kind of case the Board has never had to deal with — a head-on collision between the credibility of a flight crew versus the airworthiness of the aircraft.”
The NTSB asked Boeing to conduct tests to determine how a slat could extend by itself in flight. For the slat actuator to fail it would require 70 Gs (causing a structural failure of the airplane long before that) but the simplest way is the flaps and slats are extended in cruise, something in a slat breaks, and then they are retracted but the slat in question remains extended. On most planes, the flaps and slats move in unison with the position of the flap lever, but there was a way to have only the flaps extend. A yaw damper failure was cursory considered… at best. Later that year Boeing published a report in which they came up with a scenario to explain the upset — dubbed The Boeing Scenario — a theory in which the flight crew want to extend just the flaps.
To do this (which requires the pilots to do a rather complex series of steps) the alternate flap switch on the overhead panel above the pilot and co-pilot was activated, the circuit breaker to the leading-edge slats at the rear of the cockpit near the flight engineer’s position was pulled, the alternate flap switch was turned off and the flaps were extended to the 2° position. While still extended, the circuit breaker was pushed in, causing the slats to extend, and while the crew retracted the flaps and slats, the №7 slat remained extended.
However, Boeing went beyond what was instructed and in some ways conducted the investigation — Hoot said this was equivalent to having Dracula run a blood bank. The Boeing Scenario is a maintenance procedure and no pilot would have any reason to do it; the tests carried out and the report written were by mechanics, not pilots, who were unaware of the flight crew’s testimonies. TWA and ALPA claimed the conclusions were erroneous, misleading, inappropriate, and requested that Boeing remove this from the final report to which Boeing complied and in November 1979 it was removed. However, the report had been leaked and the media declared that Hoot was fooling around with the flaps.
On Hoot’s second flight after TWA flight 841 from Chicago to New York, a flight attendant refused to fly with him and he was forced to taxi back to the gate where the flight attendant and several passengers deplaned which delayed the flight for one hour until a replacement was found. Little did he know this incident in Chicago would be just a walk in the park. Many young pilots ripped his signature from their logbooks and refused to speak with him at pilot lounges. In his personal life and even at the grocery store people would smirk, walk off, and ask him if he had been suspended from flying. This really hurt Hoot. He started having problems sleeping, suffered anxiety and likely post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) from the events of TWA 841. The hardships greatly affected him and caused high blood pressure that was exacerbated due to the rumors and misinformation the media spread about him. Most notably there was a rumor he had committed suicide with another saying he had been admitted to a mental institution, then The Boeing Scenario was told at aeronautical institutions.
At this point, Hoot desired to tell the investigators his version of events but ALPA rep. Jim McIntyre said it was unlikely anyone at the NTSB would listen to him. McIntyre, whose job was to ensure the investigation was conducted fairly felt the investigation was being conducted unfairly and requested that Leslie Kampschror be removed after he felt Kampschror had lost impartiality. One could argue that the investigators were suffering from tunnel vision. Unfortunately, ALPA nor TWA thoroughly questioned the pilots to get more details about the events leading up to the upset… most notably that the plane yawed several times before the upset.
On April 3rd 1981, Washington lawyer Landon Dowdey, who worked with ALPA on a number of occasions and agreed to represent Hoot Gibson, filed a $20 million libel suit against Boeing, the NTSB and Leslie Kampschror where the pilots would take the stand and publicly tell their version of events.
In June 1981, after a 2 year investigation, which was the longest at the time, the NTSB issued its final report for TWA flight 841 in which they blamed the flight crew for the upset. Before a final report is released, the investigators present their findings to a five member NTSB Board where they vote whether to accept or not accept the findings and recommendations. The Board members are political appointees who serve five year terms. Despite Boeing removing its report, the NTSB adopted The Boeing Scenario into the report.
The Board wrote: “The Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the isolation of the №7 leading edge slat in the fully or partially extended position after an extension of the Nos. 2, 3, 6 and 7 leading edge slats and the subsequent retraction of the Nos. 2, 3, and 6 slats, and the captain’s untimely flight control inputs to counter the roll resulting from the slat asymmetry. Contributing to the cause was a preexisting misalignment of the №7 slat which, when combined with the cruise condition airloads, precluded retraction of that slat. After eliminating all probable individual or combined mechanical failures, or malfunctions which could lead to slat extension, the Safety Board determined that the extension of the slats was the result of the flightcrew’s manipulation of the flap/slat controls. Contributing to the captain’s untimely use of the flight controls was distraction due probably to his efforts to rectify the source of the control problem.”
At the time there was shoptalk amongst 727 pilots where if you extended just the flaps to the 2° position the plane would fly faster and performance would increase. Whether or not this really happened, doing this was unauthorized because flaps and slats are designed to be extended at slow speeds during takeoff and landing, not at very high airspeeds and high altitudes during cruise. In reality the speed decays and performance decreases with just the flaps in the 2° position due to the added drag. The belief is that while cruising at 39,000 feet, Flight Engineer Gary Banks left the cockpit to use the washroom and return meal trays. While out of the cockpit, Captain Gibson turned on the alternate flap switch directly above him, got out of his seat and pulled the circuit breaker to the leading-edge slats, turned the alternate flap switch off and extended the flaps to the 2° position. Then when Banks returned to the cockpit, out of the loop as to what had happened, he saw the popped circuit breaker and instinctively pushed it in, extending the slats which caused the vibrations. Upon realizing what had happened, Gibson retracted the flaps and slats, but the №7 slat remained extended due to a crack in the T-bolt and a misalignment. This caused the plane to roll over and dive until at 8,000 feet the slat broke off and enabled the pilots to recover the airplane.
Part of the evidence was based on Holly Wicker’s hand written statement that she saw Banks give meal trays to a flight attendant and enter the cockpit just before the upset— though at a deposition in January 1980, Mark Moscicki testified that Banks gave him the meal trays at the rear of the first class cabin, 15 feet from the cockpit door, 30 minutes prior to upset and then went straight back into the cockpit where he never saw him come back out, and what she most likely saw was Moscicki handing the trays to a stewardess — and there were several test flights done in 727s to measure the vibrations caused by extending the flaps and slats at 39,000 feet.
There were three board members present and one of them, Francis McAdams, had a heated discussion with Leslie Kampschror about the NTSB’s findings and conclusions. Had at least another board member agreed with him, McAdams would have continued his battle but since they didn’t, he reluctantly — as he publicly wrote — chose to accept the NTSB’s findings. While an investigative branch is not a court of law and their conclusions in a final report are probable in the event that such evidence is unrecoverable and there can be some errors in the report, as will be discussed later the notion the pilots did this is just ludicrous and the flight crew, TWA and ALPA argued that the investigators got the cause dead wrong.
There is no evidence to suggest that these pilots, let alone any other pilot, had ever done this procedure before or were even aware of it. ALPA and the NTSB questioned hundreds of 727 pilots — their identities were anonymous so if they admitted to it no disciplinary action would be taken against them — and not one recalled doing or hearing about this procedure. This was Hoot Gibson’s first trip as a 727 Captain in three months and he asked the two other pilots to keep an eye on him, so it’s highly unlikely that he would do this risky procedure with passengers onboard. He stated:
“At no time prior to the incident did I take any action within the cockpit either intentionally or inadvertently, that would have caused the extension of the leading-edge slats or trailing edge flaps. Nor did I observe any other crew member take any action within the cockpit, either intentional or inadvertent, which would have caused the extension”.
Scott Kennedy said in a CBS documentary about this flight, The Plane That Fell From The Sky (1983), that he had only learned of this procedure three weeks after the flight when the NTSB leaked it out to aviation publications. Gary Banks said that if Hoot actually did this then he would have reported him almost immediately. Also, Trans World Airlines’ written procedure at the time for a popped circuit breaker would be to first advise the Captain of it and only push it back in after further investigation; normally the circuit breaker would only be reset by maintenance personnel.
While The Boeing Scenario was adopted but not mentioned in the final report, there is no mention about pulled circuit breakers, instead, the report claims that the slat extended due to “the flight-crew’s manipulation of the flap/slat controls.” The conclusion is made even more ludicrous in that there is no explanation of why the crew manipulated the controls, nor why after having manipulated the controls they then lost control, other than to say that the captain made untimely corrective control inputs and both pilots became spatially disoriented. The pilots and ALPA believed that the actuator to the №7 slat had failed causing the upset, but the NTSB determined that it was “impossible” for the slats to extend without manipulating the controls.
However, in 1991, British Airways Captain and Aviation Analyst Stanley Stewart published a book titled Emergency! Crisis In The Cockpit in which he talked a bit about TWA flight 841. He suggested that there were other incidents of uncommanded slat extensions on the 727 in the years prior to and after the near-accident — a September 1979 report declared in a two year period there were 59 slat malfunctions on the 727 alone — and the flight crew knew the aircraft was potentially unstable at 39,000 feet. He believed it to be unlikely that the pilots would “fool around” with the controls and risk the stability of the aircraft. Jim McIntyre concluded the TWA 841 investigation was a textbook case on how not to conduct an accident investigation. He stepped down from his position at ALPA shortly after.
Following this near-accident, airlines did an inspection of the slat actuators for any defects and cracks which could cause in-flight deployments. It also became incriminating to erase the Cockpit Voice Recorder after a routine flight; a number of pilots jokingly referred to the CVR erase button as the “Hoot Gibson” button. The airplane involved was repaired and returned to service one month later in May of 1979. It continued to operate for TWA until 1988 when it was converted into a freighter and sold to Jet East before being sold to four more operators and finally Tropical Air Trading Co. until 2006 when it was put in storage.
Hoot made petitions to the NTSB starting in January 1983, insisting that there were other instances of uncommanded slat deployments in flight onboard 727s and ALPA found cracked slat actuator pistons which they believed caused the extension. The NTSB’s final report of TWA flight 841 noted that between 1970 and 1973, seven separate cases involving a single leading-edge slat extension and separation were reported, but the reports did not indicate whether or not the slat extension was due to flight crew involvement. Records after 1974 noted three slat extension problems reported between 1974 and 1981, one of which was inadvertently caused by the flight crew. This did not help the flight crew’s case and the NTSB rejected the appeal within a year for a lack of new evidence. However, in none of the cases involving a single slat extension did the plane become uncontrollable.
To address the elephant in the room here, it is commonly stated that Hoot Gibson was a good liar… a liar in the cockpit. However, if one is to believe that the pilots are to blame then all three of them played a role in this near- accident. Captain Gibson or First Officer Kennedy in actuality knew about this procedure beforehand, one of them suggested it, the other agreed and made no objections about doing this risky maneuver at 39,000 feet with passengers onboard, instead of informing the pilots of a popped circuit breaker, Second Officer Banks broke procedure by not first advising them of it and just instinctively pushed the circuit breaker back in, causing near-fatal consequences. Therefore, as all three of them maintained that the investigators got it wrong then to those who believe the NTSB got it right, they are liars… liars in the cockpit.
Holly Wicker filed a lawsuit against Trans World Airlines and Boeing in May 1983 for her injuries she insisted were a result of the dive and not from a car accident which happened after. The pilots, flight attendants, and some passengers took the stand to tell their version of events. After four weeks, the six person jury found TWA 70% responsible with Boeing 30% responsible, and awarded Wicker $350,000. Had they believed the pilots caused the upset then TWA would have received 100% responsibility. However, the jury concluding the NTSB’s version of events implausible was lost to the media and the verdict reinforced the pilots were to blame. During the trial, Hoot learned that Landon Dowdey’s $20 million libel suit was dismissed by a U.S. District Judge.
While the findings in a final report are not criminal charges, an act to point fingers, and their purpose is to prevent a recurrence, one’s reputation can be damaged because of the findings. Nevertheless, Trans World Airlines and ALPA heavily defended the pilots and even awarded the three pilots an award for saving the plane and allowed them to continue flying. Captain Gibson continued flying, flew the Lockheed L-1011 and eventually Captained the 747 before he retired from TWA in September 1989 due to growing health problems. Most TWA pilots enjoyed flying with him and disagreed with the NTSB’s conclusions. However some flight attendants acted negatively towards him — a stewardess shouted: “I don’t know how you got your job back after being fired but I think this company is crazy to let you fly an airplane. If I had known you were flying this airplane, I would have gotten on the public address system and told the passengers that I recommend they follow me off the airplane.’’ Passengers made rude comments about him to flight attendants and one 747 co-pilot said: “‘Hey, man, you may have fooled everybody else but you didn’t fool me. I know you did it.” Banks eventually resigned from TWA and became a professor due to the criticism he received, but also nightmares, psychological issues, and he couldn’t get on a plane without reliving the events of that April night in 1979. Scott Kennedy seemed to be the least affected but was told by captains not to touch the alternate flap switch and the circuit breakers and eventually became a 747 Flight Engineer.
Sadly, if TWA flight 841 had crashed and the flight recorders survived the impact, the pilots most likely wouldn’t have been made scapegoats. TWA 841 took off and landed with 89 passengers and crew but there were three victims: Hoot, Scott, and Gary, the pilots, the easiest ones to blame. However, TWA 841’s passengers and flight attendants praise the flight crew as no matter what, they saved them from an absolute near-catastrophe that they came within a few seconds of; therefore, they should be considered heroes. Even today, if you manage to speak them, most will continue to insist that a problem with the plane is what caused TWA flight 841 to plunge over 34,000 feet and the pilots are their own personal heroes in saving their lives.
But this leads to the question, what really happened to TWA flight 841? The reality is that based on the crew’s version of events as well as evidence from the Flight Data Recorder, the isolated extension of the №7 slat should not have caused this catastrophic loss of control — they would have to be at Mach 0.83 with an Angle of Attack at 6° for the slat to cause the plane to become laterally uncontrollable. And if the flaps were extended to the 2° position, passengers sitting over the wings would have distinctively heard the growl of the flap motors as the flaps extended and retracted, but none did. On May 12th 1979, after N840TW was flown to Kansas City, it was taken up on a flight test with just three people onboard to ensure the plane was in all working order before being returned to passenger service. In the left seat was TWA Captain George Andre and in the right seat was an original 727 test pilot during its certification; they were well aware of this aircraft’s history. During the flight, the pilots extended and retracted the slats several times. While testing the alternate flap system at 15,000 feet and a speed of 235 knots, the №7 slat failed to retract and the plane immediately rolled to the right. Captain Andre had to apply 25 degrees of aileron just to keep the plane level. When he slowed to below 230 knots the slat retracted. Then they had to take the plane up to 39,000 feet and extend the flaps and slats to 2°, causing severe vibrations that Andre described as startling, not slight as the passengers and crew described. At the Holly Wicker trial, George Andre testified that he did not believe the pilots intentionally extended the flaps and slats and believed there was a mechanical fault with the slat.
Getting to the root reason of this investigation going down a rabbit-hole, the investigators didn’t really need a CVR in this case. As previously stated the recorder only recorded the last 30 minutes of the flight so the recording would have begun AFTER they recovered from the dive and wouldn’t have provided anything really useful in determining why the plane fell over 34,000 feet in 63 seconds. A point to mention is that if the pilots had erased the tape, why was there 9 minutes of it available instead of all of it gone? Once the pilots push the erase button, it’s all gone and a tone is omitted. You may think that the pilots devised a cover story before they landed but Scott Kennedy said they didn’t even have time for that. Also, when the plane came to a stop, a mechanic plugged into the maintenance intercom to speak with the pilots. One of the first things the mechanic said was that the plane was leaking fuel and they needed to get the passengers off. From this moment on, the pilots were so busy coordinating with the flight attendants, mechanic, emergency crews, TWA operations, the tower, and transporting the passengers via bus to the terminal that there was no time to have a conversation to hide any incriminating evidence. Hoot’s typical routine shutdown flow of erasing the CVR at the end of every flight was interrupted when he noticed several switches weren’t in their normal position, there were many distractions going on that caused him to not follow his routine, and he testified at the hearing that the CVR never even crossed his mind after they landed. The fact that Hoot left everything in the cockpit to help the investigators figure out what happened is inconsistent with someone wanting to cover up a mistake he made.
Despite the NTSB stating in its final report that the CVR was analyzed and no faults had been found, this actually never happened (someone at TWA erroneously told the NTSB this). The wiring to the CVR could have been damaged by the high G-force dive and pullout or it was defective even before the flight. At no point during the investigation did the investigators ever consider the possibility that the CVR was not working properly. For the CVR to be erased, the plane must be on the ground and completely shut down with the brakes set, so they could not have erased it in flight, and the damage to the airplane, in particular the landing gear, meant that its computers didn’t recognize it was the ground. This means the pilots could not have erased the CVR even if they wanted to. A CVR technical expert interviewed for ‘Popular Mechanics’ showed that the erasure of the CVR was likely because the crew switched the power source from engine power to APU power. In aviation accidents following 1979 there have been several instances where there was a fault with the CVR such as Arrow Air 1285, Copa 201 and PIA 268, and United 2860 which crashed in 1978. (After the latter crash, United inspected all of their aircraft and found fleet wide CVR anomalies.)
Another thing the NTSB never sufficiently answered is why was there a failure flag for the lower rudder yaw damper and why was hydraulic fluid leaking from the lower rudder actuator? The 727 has a split rudder because the 32° sweepback of the wings caused Dutch Roll which is when the tail essentially wags and the wings to rock from side to side that can cause the plane to become uncontrollable. The 727 is especially susceptible to Dutch Roll, especially at high altitudes, because of its sweepback, large tail and rudder surface area.
Each rudder on the 727 is controlled by a separate hydraulic system to allow partial rudder control in case one hydraulic system fails. Both rudders are equipped with an independent yaw damper, an automatic stabilization device that senses movement around an aircraft’s vertical axis through yaw rate gyros to limit the movement of the rudder after the flaps are retracted to prevent Dutch Roll. If a yaw damper is lost during flight then the procedure would be to descend to no higher than 26,000 feet; the failure of both yaw dampers would be considered an emergency situation. One feature of the 727’s yaw damping system was a lack of rudder pedal feedback whenever rudder movement was commanded by the yaw dampers. If a yaw damper sensed yaw and commanded rudder movement, there was no corresponding feedback to the pilots’ rudder pedals. The only indication to the pilot that the yaw damper is controlling rudder movement would be an unexpected movement of the nose.
The NTSB’s explanation for the failure flag and the leaking hydraulic fluid is due to the loss of System A hydraulics and the high G-forces, but ALPA investigators said the flag appears only if the rate gyro malfunctions or if there is a loss of electrical power to the rate gyro. So, did the flag appear before or after the upset and was there a fault with the lower rudder yaw damper? Unfortunately, when the plane was repaired to be put back into service, the landing gear, the gear doors, both yaw dampers and rudder actuators, damaged electrical boxes in the main gear wheel wells, and the operation to the CVR erase function were replaced and repaired without any inspection or testing… and test if the CVR erase function was even operable. If this was a crime scene then evidence was destroyed.
In 2016, an author and airline pilot with over 25,000 hours, Emilio Corsetti III who had published a book about ALM flight 980 in 2008, published a book about TWA flight 841: Scapegoat: A Flight Crew’s Journey From Heroes to Villains to Redemption. He spent three years researching and sifting through documentation about the flight and interviewing key individuals. In an unbiased manner, Corsetti concluded the evidence best supported the slat had nothing to do with the upset, it was a yaw damper-induced lower rudder hardover which caused the upset. If a yaw damper on the 727 malfunctioned it could cause the associated rudder to go into the hardover position, causing a loss of control. In Hoot’s petition to reopen the investigation in 1987, Trans World Airlines pilot and former aeronautical engineer Leigh Johnson discovered a report done in 1984 by retired aeronautical engineer Duane Yorke who noted several abrupt heading changes to the right on the Flight Data Recorder that an extended slat could not cause. Only a yawing motion could cause these heading changes.
If a yaw damper failed in flight, there was no warning light or audible alert to notify the flight crew. The only indication of a yaw damper failure would be a failure flag in the elevator and rudder position indicator which can easily go unnoticed during normal operations, especially at night.
The NTSB conducted 118 simulator tests and none of the trials accurately duplicated the FDR traces on TWA 841. The simulator tests determined that with the slat extended at 39,000 feet it should have ripped off almost immediately and everything would be fine or the plane would have totally been controllable (a 727 was even taking up to 37,000 feet with the №7 slat fixed in the extended position and the pilots were easily able to control it). The only way for the isolated extension of the №7 slat to cause the plane to roll to a 120° bank would require the pilots to not do anything for 17 seconds; one simulator test that was similar to the FDR traces was if the pilots over-corrected and put the plane into an inverted left-spiral dive. Despite finding that the right outboard aileron showed evidence of free-floating, the effects on lateral control were not considered. The investigators never simulated the effects of a rudder hardover. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the NTSB’s own simulator tests showed the slat would have ripped off at no lower than 30,000 feet, not at 8,000 feet in actuality, and for their theory to be believed, the slat remained attached even at the speed of sound (~1,200 km/h depending on the air temperature). Boeing engineers determined that the slat could not withstand a speed greater than 363 knots (672 km/h) while extended, so the slat would have to have ripped off at an altitude close to 39,000 feet.
With all this in mind, if the extended №7 slat was what caused the upset why didn’t they recover much earlier? Something to mention is that the vibrations and more specifically, the frequency of the buffeting and the level of oscillation between a test flight on a 727–100 (known as E209) and TWA 841’s Flight Data Recorder didn’t even come close to matching. The NTSB’s explanation of this was that investigator Robert Von Husen, who was fairly new to the investigation team, made cellulose impressions of the foil traces and after photographing the impressions under a 200-power magnification, determined the oscillations between the two FDRs were identical at a frequency of 6 cycles/second and an amplitude of +/- 0.05Gs. Boeing claimed the autopilot on this 727–100 was different than on TWA 841, but Jim McIntyre determined this was insignificant and Von Husen’s findings were worthless. During this test, extending the slats caused a sharp 6° pitch up which created a marked G increase on the FDR but there was no G increase on 841’s FDR.
Lastly, TWA 841 was a 727–100 while most tests were done in the 727–200 as a 727–100 simulator was not yet available; therefore, there were different performance characteristics in roll and yaw between the two planes. This meant the tests done were pretty much unreliable if the investigators were looking for a match between their test results and what was recorded on 841’s FDR.
Had TWA, ALPA, and or the NTSB known how controversial this flight would be, TWA or one of the other two parties likely would have decided to finely analyze every part of the plane that could cause a loss of control to determine any pre-existing fault that may have caused this near-accident. With TWA eagerly wanting this plane back in service, valuable evidence was removed without being inspected. As the yaw dampers were removed but not inspected for any pre-existing faults, why exactly the lower rudder yaw damper failed remains unknown. Though overall the theory is circumstantial, the evidence shows it’s the most likely cause.
After Leigh Johnson finished reading Yorke’s report and was satisfied with his credibility, he began writing a 116 page petition — much more tightly edited than the first one — that would take two years to complete to reopen the investigation. He first wrote “The NTSB erroneously assumed that an extended slat had caused the upset of TWA 841”.
With all of these facts, the physical evidence shows this is what most likely happened. While cruising at 39,000 feet, the bolt to the outboard right aileron on the 13 year old 727 fractured, causing the aileron to free-float up (flutter) and create the high frequency vibration Captain Hoot Gibson reported. As the aileron floated up, the plane banked to the right and turned off its heading, the autopilot tried to correct for this by moving the control wheel left. Once the control wheel turned more than 10°, the spoilers on the left wing deployed to aid in roll control, creating the slight buffeting. With the plane turning right and the autopilot commanding a left turn, the 727 was in a cross-controlled position. The lower rudder yaw damper rate gyro and or coupler sensed discrepant rudder inputs, causing a lower rudder hardover and the plane yawed severely right. In this condition the left wing produced more lift as a result — on sweptback planes like the 727, a large sideslip angle produces a large rolling moment. Hoot disconnected the autopilot and applied opposite aileron and upper rudder, but with the lower rudder in the hardover position and limited roll control due to the right outboard aileron free-floating, his control inputs were insufficient to prevent TWA 841 from going into an uncontrollable spiral dive (like the ailerons, rudder movement on the 727 is also limited when the flaps are retracted).
To recover from this situation would be to follow the procedures for a yaw damper failure and engage the Standby hydraulic system, independent of System A and B hydraulics, to free the lower rudder but since the pilots didn’t know they had a yaw damper failure and never suspected the lower rudder was in the hardover position that was out of the question. The other way would be cutting off hydraulic pressure to the lower rudder. When the landing gear was lowered, the over extension of the right main landing gear ruptured the cooling line for System A hydraulics which provided hydraulic pressure to the lower rudder. With hydraulic pressure gone, the lower rudder centered, allowing the pilots to recover. Scott Kennedy lowering the landing gear was what ultimately saved the plane. The evidence showed the over extension of the right landing gear and not both main gears and the inboard flap track — a pattern of differential damage — was consistent with a large left wing forward sideslip angle present of the gear extension. As for why the №7 slat extended, the NTSB determined that it showed a lack of wear, was misaligned, therefore did not lock into its locking mechanism (while the other slats did) and was held in place by only hydraulic pressure and aerodynamic forces. With the hydraulic pressure gone, the aerodynamic forces of the dive caused the slat to extend at 8,000 feet and quickly tore off.
As for why the plane had a tendency to roll to the left instead of right after the upset, it’s possible the upper rudder was receiving discrepant rudder inputs and was applying some rudder to the left but didn’t go into the hardover position.
Hoot, John Rohlfing, now the TWA/ALPA accident investigation committee chairman, and Landon Dowdey agreed with the findings. In October 1990, ALPA sent its second petition to the NTSB to reopen the investigation, with much stronger evidence than before that the pilots bore no wrongdoing for causing the upset. As usual with these petitions, a cursory review was done and it was rejected. However, Leigh Johnson wanted to alert the NTSB of serious investigative errors and scientific misconduct. Finally, in 1995, after two fatal 737 crashes in which the rudder was the suspect and Johnson sending two more reconsiderations in the nature of Mandamus, a formal request act for the NTSB on a matter before them, the petition was reviewed and four months later it was denied.
Even though a week before the first crash, uncommanded rudder inputs were reported and the circuit breaker to the yaw damper was pulled, the most likely cause for these crashes was that the Power Control Unit was not designed to withstand thermal effects — going from very cold to very hot temperatures — which caused the rudder to jam and rudder inputs becoming reversed. Hoot’s petition was then sent to the U.S. Ninth Court of Appeals but they rejected the appeal for a lack of jurisdiction due to the NTSB’s “unreviewable discretion”.
For those wondering if a yaw-damper-induced lower rudder hardover is what really happened on TWA 841 then why didn’t this happen again as no changes to the 727s rudder or yaw-damper system were ever made? Well, it did. Four yaw damper induced rudder hardovers during cruise flight and one during takeoff on the 727 were reported from January 1979 to 1991 due to faulty couplers but none had an outboard aileron free-floating as on flight 841. Nothing ever happens for one single thing: on TWA 841 it was a broken aileron bolt, yaw damper failure, and being at 39,000 feet (higher than in the other cases) that caused this upset.
When the NTSB found that 21 minutes of the Cockpit Voice Recorder was missing, instead of analyzing it for any faults, they quickly concluded the pilots had erased it to hide something incriminating and from that moment on became scapegoats. This is what made TWA flight 841 different from every other case because the investigators developed a biased, preconceived notion about what they believed happened instead of doing an appropriate tear down analysis to determine beyond a reasonable doubt what caused the upset. After flight tests, simulator tests, sworn testimonies of the passengers and crew declared that the investigators’ hunch that the №7 caused the upset was not what happened, the investigators manipulated the evidence so it fit. Instead of trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt why there was a failure flag for the lower rudder yaw damper or if this failure could create the same flight path as TWA flight 841, they stuck with the theory that the slat had caused the upset and the pilots were to blame. The evidence they presented in the final report was fabricated and cherry-picked in order to support their theory… even if there were many flaws and didn’t bear any resemblance to the flight crew’s version of events. By making a mountain out of a molehill about a considerable portion of the CVR blank, which wouldn’t have provided anything super useful in determining the cause of the upset, the investigation spiraled into a rabbit hole that caused the investigators to do their job of figuring out why the plane almost crashed improperly.
Since the National Transportation Safety Board’s founding in 1967, they have investigated over 150,000 aviation occurrences, but as we all know, nothing is perfect and the NTSB is no exception. The case of TWA flight 841 is when they got the cause dead wrong. However, this should not affect the NTSB’s reputation and the accuracy of their findings in the over 150,000 other reports in any way as the statistics show that they only get 1:>150,000 wrong.
Today, Flight Data Recorders are digitized and record dozens of parameters (hundreds of parameters on fly-by-wire aircraft like military aircraft and most Airbus Industrie aircraft) such as the position of the flaps, slats, and rudder(s) to name a few, the Cockpit Voice Recorder records a minimum of the last two hours of a flight, there is live streaming of data to the ground, FlightRadar, and the NTSB most likely won’t ever develop a preconceived notion about a cause from almost moment one, so the chances of them or any investigative branch getting the cause wrong when they have all the above listed available to them… particularly the What wrong… are much slimmer than they were in 1979.
But, over 40 years later does it matter that the NTSB reopen the investigation into TWA flight 841 and release a revised report? I feel it does because unlike other cases where a valuable piece(s) of evidence is inaccessible, such as on the ocean floor, or the airplane is severely fragmented and valuable components are destroyed, for TWA flight 841, the plane landed safely, meaning everything was pretty much there for the investigators to inspect, and everybody survived so they had a live flight crew to talk to, but a petty thing made the investigators become tunnel visioned and not consider other causes for the upset.
Captain Harvey “Hoot” Gibson died on January 31st 2015 at the age of 80, exactly eight years ago to the day of this writing, taking his innocence to the grave. His health greatly declined in his final years and being wrongly accused took an emotional toll that affected him even 30 years later. First Officer Scott Kennedy also maintained his and the other two pilots’ innocence even after Hoot died; he said a few years before his death in 2017: “I can’t say with absolute certainty what caused TWA 841 to roll over and dive some 39,000 feet, but I can say with absolute certainty that the investigators got this one wrong.” Gary Banks to this day is reluctant to talk about TWA 841 and has declined many interviews.
Unfortunately, despite the horrible injustice this flight crew endured and everything Jim McIntyre, Landon Dowdey, Leigh Johnson, and John Rohlfing went through to clear the flight crew’s names, in 2022, the long-running and well received documentary series Mayday, also known as Air Crash Investigation and Air Disasters, produced an episode about TWA flight 841 in its 22nd season titled “Terror Over Michigan”. For the most part, the episode tells the NTSB’s version of events and blames the flight crew for the upset without pointing out any flaws in it or present the lower rudder hardover theory. The episode states that the vibrations during the flight tests caused by the slats deploying in cruise were consistent with the vibrations on TWA 841’s FDR, the isolated extension of the №7 slat would cause an uncontrollable roll, and recovery was only possible when the slat tore off at 8,000 feet, neither of the three are true. Only in the last 30 seconds of the episode does it subtly suggest that the investigators got the cause wrong. But as nothing is presented to counter the NTSB’s version of events, viewers who have never heard of this story before will likely believe the investigators got it right. There are several episodes which stated or suggested that the investigators, including the NTSB in a few episodes, got the cause wrong; Emilio Corsetti III even gave a producer a copy of Scapegoat (which had been out since 2016) in 2021 when he learned that an episode about TWA flight 841 was still waiting to be greenlit… which turned out to have been to no avail. This is not to say that the cause presented in other episodes of Mayday are wrong or have major errors, it’s just that if the only way to produce an episode about TWA flight 841 was to blame the pilots for the upset then the producers shouldn’t have even bothered to make an episode about it. It’s mind-boggling that they decided to kick Hoot and Scott down onto the ground when they are no longer alive to defend themselves. Hopefully a “Terror Over Michigan Part 2” which goes with the yaw damper-induced lower rudder hardover theory will be made.
The message of TWA flight 841 is that for a pilot, you may get into a situation where something happens in which you save the plane, or the plane crashes and you survive, either way you bore no wrongdoing, but you are made a scapegoat and your flying career is over or tattered. The message for investigators is to always let the evidence lead you to a conclusion, never develop a preconceived notion on what you think happened and be selective on what you feel is credible.
I’m glad that I was able to provide a very comprehensive analysis of TWA flight 841… even if you still believe that there were liars in the cockpit. There is a lot I wanted to include in this write up but because it was getting pretty long, I had to concise some things or leave out things which weren’t that important. One thing I strongly advise checking out is the 1990 Petition for Reconsideration of Probable Cause.
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Special thanks to Admiral Cloudberg’s Plane Crash Series which inspired me to do this write-up (I only intend to do one more after this); Emilio Corsetti III’s terrific and must-read book Scapegoat and interviews he did with notable individuals such as Hoot and Scott which gave me a wealth of information for this write-up; Leigh Johnson and TWA flight 841 passenger Roger Peterson who gave me some important details.
