Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades shortly before midnight on December 29, 1972, while flying from New York's JFK Airport to Miami. The Lockheed L-1011 TriStar (N310EA), a relatively new aircraft delivered just months earlier, went down after all three cockpit crew members, including Captain Robert Loft and First Officer Albert Stockstill, became fixated on a faulty landing gear indicator light—which was later discovered to be caused by a simple burned-out bulb. During this distraction, a subtle bump on the control yoke had disengaged the autopilot's altitude hold mode, causing the plane to drift downward imperceptibly while Flight Engineer Donald Repo was in the avionics bay trying to visually confirm the landing gear position. The crew missed the altitude warning chime, and the plane crashed, killing 101 of the 176 people aboard, though 75 miraculously survived. This tragedy marked the first fatal crash of a Lockheed L-1011 and the first severe accident involving a widebody aircraft, prompting sweeping changes in cockpit resource management and crew distraction protocols that reshaped aviation safety forever.