Eastern Airlines Flight 1155

In September 1963, at around five in the evening, 149 passengers and crew boarded Eastern Airlines Flight 1155. It was a large crowd for a flight that was usually pretty empty, except for around the holidays. There was a scout convention being held in Los Angeles that weekend and several troops from the Dallas/Ft Worth area were on board, along with the usual business types and miscellaneous travelers. The flight originated in Dallas and was to contain a short layover in Denver. They were scheduled for a final destination of Los Angeles. Their flight was due in late.

Flight 1155 never made it to Los Angeles. They didn't make it to Denver either.

No one seemed to know where the fifty-seven ton Boeing 707 was, nor what had become of her 149 souls. The plane simply vanished. The flight took off at Dallas/Ft Worth airport in September 1963 and wasn't seen again for fifty-three years.

I was working the ramp at Dallas/Ft Worth International Airport. It didn’t look like 2016 was going to be my year. I was also a part time student attending community college, but I was about to drop out. I was pretending. I was avoiding lying to myself about my future. I was twenty-five years old and I didn't have a fucking clue.

The lie didn't make me any better, or any worse than other twenty something year old's, but that did little to assuage my feeling of worthlessness. All of my friends had gone on to college and landed good jobs. They were working at something that was hopefully bringing them a sense of meaning and purpose. I was working at an airport.

The bell rang and I looked at the white board. I had a flight due at 10:55. Time to make the doughnuts.

The flight was on time. Two minutes early actually. It was a puddle jumper. That's the term most of us ramp guys use. It's a fancy way of saying it was a short flight on a smaller aircraft. The flight had come in from Austin and was probably only about half full. People returning from their vacations were mixed in amongst the men and women of industry. You could easily set them apart due to their lack of business casual attire and by their genuine smiles.

About an hour later, another plane landed. This flight was not listed on the whiteboard and air traffic control never picked it up on radar. It landed, without clearance, on runway 31L. Luckily, it was late and 31L was mainly used for cargo planes. It was also lucky that runway 31L was clear of other traffic at the time. I would learn later that this was flight 1155. An Eastern Airlines 707 that had mysteriously disappeared in 1963.

My eyes gazed upon a plane that had not been seen for over fifty years, but I didn't know that yet. As for why the plane decided to taxi to my assigned gate was a mystery. Where did it come from and why? Where had it been? The mystery of flight 1155 wouldn't remain for long now. It was finally ready to give up its secrets.

The aircraft taxied to the gate, but it did not power down. The jet bridge in use had been designed for modern aircraft not the aged 707. Consequently, the bridge did not reach the fuselage of the aircraft. My attempts to reach the flight crew via radio were futile. After ten minutes I pushed them back anyway. I then called a buddy at Fed-Ex to borrow some air stairs.

It was dark and the aircraft hadn't shown up on radar. Had this landing occurred in the daytime, every airport police officer would have been here ten minutes ago and probably a large number of Dallas police as well. They will be in the morning, at the latest, and I should probably call them sooner than later. For now though I waited for the air stairs and walked around the plane.

Smoking was forbidden on airport property, but so was landing without proper clearance, so as I looked over the plane, I smoked a cigarette. I was leaning up against the nose gear when the airport police pulled up. Apparently, a nosy gate agent had called to report that a member of the ground crew was smoking.

That was my fault and in more ways than just lighting up. The gate agent was more than a little sore at me over the way we broke up. The plane wasn't the least bit suspicious to her. It was an airport after all. Airports have planes.

It was about the same time the airport police rolled up, that the air stairs I had asked for did as well. The officers looked at me, looking at them, looking at the stairs. My buddy was looking at the plane. The whole thing would have been comical if I hadn't been scared shitless.

The trained enforcers of the laws and regulations of Dallas/Ft Worth International Airport, were no more concerned with the plane than the gate agent had been. At least not at that time. It was an airplane at an airport. Nothing out of the ordinary there. They were concerned however, with me and my smoking. They asked to see my identification and told me to put out the cigarette. They asked me the standard questions that police officers typically ask and wrote me a citation for smoking and then they were gone.

They got in their car and went about their business. I was shocked. Not a question about the plane. Not a passing statement about Eastern, or the age of the plane. Nothing. Aviation knowledge did not appear to be a prerequisite for joining the ranks of the airport police.

My buddy however, he knew. He knew something was up when I had asked for the air stairs. The aircraft had been on the ground for about 45 minutes at this point. I hadn't heard a word from the crew. The cabin door was still shut. There were no visible faces in any of the windows. A defunct airline’s 707 was sitting on the tarmac at almost midnight, with no crew communication and no passenger complaints. This was definitely not a routine flight.

I rolled the air stairs into position and began to ascend. I saw no flight attendant waiting at the cabin door. I didn't see anyone at all. I disengaged the latch and swung open the door. The cabin was notable for two things. First, it was quiet. I hadn't noticed, but the engines had finally been powered down. Secondly and probably most notable was that the cabin was empty. I turned to the cockpit. The door was open and I was looking through the windscreen at an American Airlines 737 parked at its gate.

I looked at the main instrument panels and over at the flight engineers instruments. All of the 707's gauges and instruments were dark, save for two small lights. Indicators for the leading edge flaps. These were the only lights illuminated of the hundreds of possibilities. The two small green lights stared at me menacingly. They were blinking on and off, as if in a pattern.

There was no flight crew. No captain. No first officer. No engineer.

This is nuts. Impossible. This has to be a dream.

Only, it wasn't a dream.

The airport police had returned and I didn't hear them enter the cabin. I jumped and hit my head on the bulkhead when the same officer that had written me the citation not a half an hour ago said "now this is fuckin' weird." He had startled the shit out of me. Almost literally. Another officer was inspecting the overhead compartments and pulling back curtains. I simply hadn't noticed at first, but all of the luggage and all of their belongings were still onboard.

There were coats piled in overhead bins and lying in seats. A baby bottle was dripping formula onto the carpeting. Cigarette smoke hung in the air and wafted from armrest ashtrays as if their butts had just recently been extinguished. There was a final edition copy of the Dallas Morning News on a tray table. An article on the front page proclaimed President Kennedy was due to visit Dallas in November. Someone had drawn a line through the small black and white portrait of him that accompanied the piece.

Flight 1155 encountered nasty weather over Colorado and the crew began to suspect that they were off course. They also believed that their instrument readings might be false. The previous crew had informed them in Dallas that some of the instruments appeared to be malfunctioning. The maintenance crew looked them over before departure and declared that they were operational.

What the crew was unaware of, was the ice accumulating on the leading edge of their wings. They were also oblivious to the aircraft losing speed. They would soon discover these things and fail to maintain control. They would discover these things and it would be too late.

The flight crew was unable to increase their speed and the ice that had accumulated on the wings was robbing them of lift. The aircraft began to sound warning alarms. They were stalling. The captain made the decision to nose slightly down to compensate for the stall condition and sealed their fate.

The nose down action resulted in uncorrectable overspeed and partnered with their inability to generate the lift needed to level the aircraft, the airframe began to break apart. Seconds later, flight 1155 slammed into the ground at the periphery of Great Sand Dunes National Park.

A lot of the plane had been destroyed in the impact. The majority of what remained was embedded deep into the ground. What little of the wreckage that was exposed to the surface was in a matter of days covered by the erosion of the dunes and by runoff from the Rocky Mountains.

After the flight disappeared, there was a campaign by Eastern Airlines officials to keep the incident under wraps. The official Civil Aeronautics Board investigation had been sealed and save for a few minor newspaper articles at the time of the crash and a few in subsequent years, major headlines were avoided. The company was deeply in debt at the time and would not survived the publicity of another major mass casualty accident.

The families of the victims were notified and were paid for their lost loved ones and for their silence. Any violation of the terms of their agreements were dealt with swiftly and occasionally, with violence. Every so often someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to have information about the flight, but these accounts never amount to anything tangible or significant, if they are heard at all.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the coverup from Eastern Airlines officials, the plane was simply declared as "missing" by the CAB in their final report. Any logical person could deduce that it had crashed, but without wreckage, or bodies, it was hard to definitively say what had happened and where. That is, until the plane showed up on the tarmac at Dallas/Ft Worth International Airport and made its way to the gate it had departed from fifty-three years earlier.

The two green leading edge lights that were blinking on the instrument panel? Some bright kid figured out they were blinking "SOS" in Morse code. This hunch led investigators to believe that ice on the wings was a possible explanation for the crash.

In the cargo hold were boxes and boxes of undelivered mail, including six boxes from the United States Forest Service. All six contained brochures destined for Great Sand Dunes National Park.

I'm looking forward to my new job at the National Transportation Safety Board. I'm due in Washington D.C next week.

Maybe I'll take the bus.