The items studied by the National Transportation Safety Board in the US on behalf of the Bolivian authorities "So he recommended we sleep in an altitude tent beforehand. So on 4 January, Futrell and Stoner handed over the plane fragments to Bill English from the NTSB, who took them to a laboratory in Washington.The housemates had already concluded that poor weather, the tricky descent to El Alto airport and unreliable equipment had all probably played a part in the crash. However, Futrell, Stoner and their companions found six body parts in separate locations.They decided to bury each find and mark the spot with a geomarker and a stack of rocks, in case anyone wanted to retrieve them later on. It gave me hope that people still care," Greer says.She had asked Futrell and Stoner to bring back some metal from the plane for her. The 19 passengers were from Paraguay, South Korea and the United States. Slowly they realised they were looking at a human femur lying among the rubble.
Among the passengers was the wife of the U.S. He found himself on a Wikipedia page listing 19 unrecovered flight recorders, and one immediately caught his attention - Eastern Airlines Flight 980, which had crashed in Bolivia in 1985, as it was coming in to land in the capital, La Paz.Unlike most of the missing black boxes, this one wasn't at the bottom of the sea, it was on land. "Every now and then there was a distant avalanche that sounded like a runaway train.
"Robert decided that the best course of action would be to get us up on a mountain, to teach us how to ice climb, because we honestly didn't know what we were doing when it came to crampons and ice axes and being tied into a rope," says Stoner.The housemates also struggled with the changes in temperature that veered from -6C (21F) in the shade to 9C (48F) in the sun.
The Boeing 727 had just been cleared to land at El Alto airport at 19:47, when it veered off course and crashed into Mount Illimani, the 21,000ft (6,400m) peak that towers over La Paz. They rushed over to see what he had found. Now we have something," Greer says.Futrell and Stoner had not found the cockpit flight recorder, it said, but rather the rack that had fixed it on to the plane - and the promising spool of tape turned out to be "an 18-minute recording of the 'Trial by Treehouse' episode of the television series 'I Spy', dubbed in Spanish." It turns out the glacier where the plane had crashed had retreated and there hadn't been much snowfall, so we might be able to see debris not seen for decades," Stoner says.Rauch also revealed that some of the wreckage had fallen over a cliff, landing 3,000ft (915m) below the rest of the plane. It pumps in nitrogen and simulates a low oxygen environment. I envisioned him hanging off the end of a cliff and me being the only person that could save his life. The crew was cleared to descend the aircraft from 25,000 feet to 18,000 feet.
Worthwhile things are often challenging and that's what we were looking for. The discovery disproved one conspiracy theory put forward by former Eastern Airlines pilot George Jehn in his book Final Destination: Disaster. However, it means both the recorders are still up on the mountain and could still be intact. We found the emergency slide and life jackets, plane windows, landing gear and part of the instrument panel from the cockpit," says Futrell. Eastern flight 980 was a scheduled flight from Ascuncion (ASU), Paraguay to La Paz (LPB), Bolivia. "We were on the couch drinking beer," Stoner recalls, "and Dan said, 'Look, this black box is just sitting on the top of a mountain in Bolivia.
'"Futrell, 32, a former soldier who served two tours in Iraq, says he misses physical challenges now that he works at an internet company in Boston. "I was surprised that someone would be interested in finding out what happened.