Fighting For Survival Over Los Angeles | TWA 742

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This is the story of TWA flight 542, On the 28th of august 1973 a boeing 707 was to fly from don mueang international airport to san fransico international airport, but this was not a direct flight it had stops, the plane was supposed to stop at kaitak in hong kong, taipei inn taiwan, okinawa japan, guam honolulu and LA before finally getting to sanfranciso. Imagine riding that flight from one end to the other. That would have been an experience. The plane had 141 passengers and 11 crew members. Before we go on can we just marvel at the the fact that a modern narrow body like the 737 or the A320 is capable of doing what a giant quad jet did in the 1970s, in fact planes like the A321 or the 757 can fly more passengers longer with two fewer engines and in a smaller footprint. We really are living in the future. But back to the story of flight 742. We join the jet as the plane closes in on LA from honolulu. The jet is at 33,000 feet with nothing out of the ordinary the pilots of the plane are in contact with LAX center. At 9:29 pm the controller gave the crew the all clear to take the plane down to 11,000 feet and so the crew disengaged the autopilot and then started taking the plane down. In the cabin the entertainment for the night had just ended and and the cabin crew members were making their way around the plane starting to prep it for landing. A few people stood around the lavatories. As the cabin crew members worked away the pilots flew the plane,bringing it down to their assigned altitude of 11,000 feet. As they were passing 22000 when the plane was at about 350 knots all hell broke lose. Out of nowhere the planes nose pitches up violently and then almost as instantly it had gone up the nose dropped and then the cycle repeated. The crew verified that the autopilot was indeed turned off and they turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. This looked like it would get worse before it got better. The nose would go up and then down and then up and then down. The flight data recorder recorded 50 such oscillations over the span of 2 minutes. In the cockpit the pilots frantically pulled back power on the engines and the flight engineer pulled the circuits to rudder power, mach trim and the yaw damper. If any of these subsystems were causing these control issues then this should fix that problem. But the problem still persisted the first officer and the captain were both working to get the plane under control. Trying to counteract the oscillations the best that they could. But as they wrestled with the plane the jet lost speed and altitude. By the time the jet was at 19,500 feet the oscillations had dampened and the plane was under control. The pilots would have been shaken by what had just happened. They tested the controllability of their jet to see what the plane could and couldn't do. That information would be crucial in the coming landing. If there was something wrong with their jet they needed to know about it now. A controllability issue popping up right before landing would be a very bad thing as the pilots would not have the time or altitude to recover from an upset. But the plane checked out fine, the controls were all normal except for a little bit of stiffness when they pushed the yoke forward. But they had another problem, the people on board, a lot of people had been standing when the upset happened. The ones who weren't lucky enough to make it to a seat in time were thrown from the floor to the ceiling multiple times as the plane oscillated. Some people were badly hurt and they needed to get this plane down on the ground as soon as possible. One of the flight attendants was a navy flight surgeon and two of the passengers onboard had medical experience, the three of them started treating the badly injured people the best that they could with the limited resources that they had. The pilots told LAX approach to have emergency vehicles meet them on the runway as soon as the plane landed. As they were having this conversation with the controllers the TWA technical team was made aware of what had happened to flight 742 They were trying to provide the pilots with all the information that they