But where Dan carefully avoids any mention of conspiracy, favoring a more straightforward interpretation of the crash, Greer seems to have embraced the idea. Bolivian air traffic controllers cleared the Boeing 727 to descend to 18,000 feet on its approach to La Paz. Gomez and his team spent three days searching the glacier. Dan and Robert find a piece of metal lodged in ice, chip it out, and then decide not to do that again—there’s not enough oxygen up here to swing a pickax around. Once the Bolivian air force saw it on the peak, it mobilized a team to get to the crash site, but a storm had dumped several feet of snow, and avalanches turned them back. “This is how Livingstone traveled,” Isaac says, surveying the explosion of gear as we hastily jettison nonessential items—candy, notebooks, an extra stove, more candy—to send back in the 4x4. “This surprises me not one iota,” George Jehn wrote in an e-mail when I sent him an update. It took a full day to locate the wreckage. This story first appeared on OutsideOnline.com. (Eastern declared bankruptcy in 1989 and dissolved in 1991.). Isaac was responsible for keeping them alive. They arrived at the wreckage on July 5, and Kelly spent a day reading letters she had written to her husband since the crash. Most planes carry two flight recorders: the cockpit voice recorder, which documents conversation among the pilots and the engineer, and the flight-data recorder, which notes the status of the plane’s mechanical systems several times per second. Jose and Robert find a pilot’s jacket half buried in the glacier and start digging it out. In 2006, a Bolivian climbing guide named Roberto Gomez got wind that plane parts were turning up in the glacier below the crash site. But here, in the newly melted ice, there’s an almost comical number of parts. Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 (1985) At 20,098 MSL, it is the highest controlled flight into terrain aviation accident. None of them found any bodies or flight recorders, nor could anybody establish what brought down the plane. The next morning, we hike to the steep glacial moraine that marks the edge of the debris field and find more parts on the ridge. The Paraguayan mafia? “But I find myself becoming more and more obsessed.”. And some crayons. “No bodies,” he says. “Dan and Robert walk to the uranium mine and return 10 minutes later. By midmorning we’re all thoroughly exhausted, and the novelty of new plane parts has worn off. Peter Frick-Wright Outside Oct 2016 30 min Permalink Maybe none of this would have mattered if there wasn’t also a storm southeast of the airport. Aircraft. What’s more, the navigation technology at Campbell’s disposal was rudimentary. Futrell and Stoner spent five months preparing for the expedition. Maybe Eastern Airlines was running drugs? Nine months after the crash, Don McClure, the chairman of the ALPA’s accident-­investigation board, was part of a separate inquiry into the overall safety of flying in South America. They spent five months working on their fitness and training for altitude, before taking off for Bolivia with a crazy plan, a bit of savings, and two weeks of holidays. What Happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 980? Prevented from travelling Isaac researched the altitude, weather, skills they’d need to learn, and contingencies if things didn’t go smoothly—in short, he was tasked with keeping them alive. Kelly declined to be interviewed for this article, but she told her story to George Jehn. The ascent doesn’t kill us, but it tries. He told them that all he’d found were plane parts and snakeskins. But with orange ­metal in hand, giving them to a ­bureaucrat seemed like a good way to get them locked away forever. By taking the flight recorders and tape back to the U.S., they discovered, they had violated Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, a document that lays out the rules for international air travel. [aircrash] What Happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 980 … fascinating aircrash cold case – about a 1985 crash into a Bolivian mountain … ‘We see an astonishing number of contraband crocodile and snakeskins, which were probably being smuggled to Miami to be made into black-market goods like shoes and handbags. Why not?” Jehn said when we spoke in May. Peter Frick-Wright/ Outside Magazine The next day, the men searcher higher. Was it a bomb? “It’s the single greatest aviation mystery of the 20th century.”. Isaac picks it up. As Gomez tells his story, it’s clear that the Bolivian and American versions of this mystery diverge fairly quickly. ” “On New Year’s Day 1985, Eastern 980” So, according to this article, the plane crashed 4 years prior to taking off and had two different flight numbers. Theories festered and grew. The two of them snuggling in his recliner. Sure, but no one can really think of anything. Named after the Incan god of knowledge, Operation Thonapa is the expedition to find the black box of Eastern Flight 980, by Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner.