PHANTOMS OF FLIGHT 401
Place: Aircraft of Eastern Airlines, USA
Time: From 1972 onward
Early in December 1972, a stewardess with Eastern Airlines told some of her colleagues of a premonition, in which she had seen a Lockheed Tri-Star on approach to Miami International Airport. She saw the port wing crumple as the aircraft hit the ground and heard the despairing cries of the injured. The disaster would occur, she said, "around the holidays, closer to New Year". Asked if she and her colleagues were to be the cabin crew, she replied: "No, but it's going to be real close."
On December 29, there was a last-minute change in crew schedules, the stewardess and her colleagues did not take Flight 401 from New York to Miami. Late in the evening, the aircraft crashed in the Florida Everglades, all of the flight crew and many of the passengers being killed. Among the fatalities were Capt Bob Loft and flight engineer, Second Officer Don Repo.
The cause of the crash was found to be a couple of minor design faults in the controls, and Lockheed rapidly corrected them. However, it appears that some undamaged parts of the aircraft were subsequently recycled in other planes. Following this, a number of mysterious incidents were reported.
One of the VPs of Eastern Airlines boarded a Miami-bound TriStar at JFK airport and spoke to a uniformed captain sitting in First Class. Suddenly, he recognised the captain was Bob Loft - at which point the apparition vanished.
On another occasion at JFK, Loft was seen, and spoken to, by the plane's captain and two flight attendants The captain was sufficiently disturbed to cancel the flight.
One aircraft, number 318, was particularly affected. A woman found herself sitting next to an Eastern Airlines flight officer who looked pale and ill, but would not speak; she called a stewardess but before the eyes of several people, the man disappeared. The woman was later shown photographs of Eastern Airlines engineers, and identified Don Repo. On another flight, from New York to Mexico City, his face appeared in the oven window, and two stewardesses and an engineer from the flight deck heard him say: "Watch out for fire on this airplane". On its take-off from Mexico City, one of the plane's engines malfunctioned, and it had to return to the runway.
There were other incidents. In one, a TriStar captain said he had spoken to Repo, who told him: "There will never be another crash (of a TriStar)... we will not let it happen."
Sources: The Catalogue of Ghost Sightings by Brian Allen and The Ghost of Flight 401 by John G Fuller

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