31 years later, we found the flight recorders

Dan Futrell
Operation Thonapa
Published in
5 min readJun 3, 2016

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The writing on the cable casing confirmed on day three that we’d been finding pieces of the recorders for the previous three days. None of the other pieces of metal had writing on the outside as expected.

We started out this trip with the goal of finding the black box — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — of Eastern Airlines Flight 980. We also had a goal to live a life of adventure, to challenge ourselves physically and mentally, and to come back with a story.

We found what we believe to be the flight recorders.

The first piece of international orange metal we found, but weren’t yet sure if it was from one of the recorders.

On day 1 searching the lower debris field near Mina Mesa Khala, we found two pieces of metal. On both, one side was “international orange” and the other was what we’ve been calling Boeing green because it seems to be on every piece out here and isn’t an Eastern Airlines color.

Also, both pieces were significantly mangled, twisted, and scratched presumably from three forces: the Boeing 727 flying into the mountain at 500 mph, the metal fell 4000 feet down from the impact site to the base of Illimani, and the natural grinding of ice and boulders that make up this living mountain.

Marking the location of the second piece of one of the recorders found.

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Adventurer. Marathoner. Veteran. Found the missing black box of EA980 at 20k feet in Bolivia. www.opthonapa.com. Founder, Polymath University. www.polymathu.org