I’ve been an air traffic controller at Miami International for nearly fifteen years.
That means twelve-hour night shifts, stale coffee, and listening to people’s voices thousands of feet above the earth, trusting you like their lives depend on it—because they do.
You stop thinking about it after a while.
Until something happens that makes you realize you should have been afraid all along.
For me, that “something” was Flight 390.
It was supposed to be a routine return flight from New York to Miami—an old Lockheed L-1011 TriStar operated by a small charter company.
Two pilots: Captain Mark Harris, fifty-one, over twenty thousand flight hours; First Officer Jake Lane, thirty-seven, ex–Air Force.
The aircraft itself had a history—an ex–Eastern Airlines plane, refurbished and leased out cheap.
We joked about those planes still carrying ghosts from the 1970s, back when Eastern 401 went down in the Everglades.
But it was just gallows humor. Or so we thought.
22:57, my radar screen showed the familiar green blip entering our sector at flight level 390—thirty-nine thousand feet, clear skies, smooth cruising.
“Miami Center, this is Flight 390, level at three-nine-zero, all systems nominal,”
Captain Harris said over comms.
His tone was relaxed, professional.
“Copy that, 390. Expect descent in about twenty minutes.”
Routine. Predictable. Comforting.
That’s the thing about aviation—you crave boredom.
But at 23:09, something changed.
There was a ping, followed by a faint metallic sound in my headset. Not static—more like a rhythmic clink… clink… clink, echoing against metal.
“Uh, Flight 390, we’re getting background noise on your channel. You okay up there?”
Silence. Then the captain again, his voice tighter this time:
“Yeah, Miami, we’re fine. Just a minor sound from the avionics bay. We’re checking it out.”
That made me frown.
The avionics bay—the “hell hole,” as pilots call it—is the compartment beneath the cockpit. You access it through a trapdoor behind the captain’s seat. It’s full of wiring, hydraulic lines, circuit breakers.
No one goes down there mid-flight. Ever.
The comm line stayed open for about two minutes. I didn’t hear words at first, just the background hum of engines and breathing. Then something else: a third voice.
It was low, calm, male.
Not the captain. Not the first officer.
It said:
“Check the hydraulics. Right side.”
Then Harris whispered, almost under his breath, “Jesus Christ, Lane… do you see that?”
And the channel cut.
I tried raising them for five minutes. Nothing. Then, at 23:14, they came back on.
“Miami Center, disregard. False alarm. We had a… reflection. Everything’s stable now.”
A reflection?
In the avionics bay?
That didn’t make any sense. But they sounded shaken, and we were trained not to spook pilots mid-flight.
“Copy that, 390,” I said. “You’re cleared to continue.”
They stayed on course. Everything looked normal.
At 23:28, the blip was steady at 39,000 feet.
At 23:41, I prepared to hand them off for descent.
Then, at 23:42, the radar went blank.
No warning. No transponder dropout. Just gone—like someone had deleted them from the sky.
“Flight 390, radio check.”
Nothing.
“Flight 390, this is Miami Center, do you read?”
Silence.
Within minutes, emergency procedures kicked in. We scrambled the Coast Guard, search and rescue, flight path triangulation.
But there was nothing. No ELT signal. No debris. No oil slick.
By dawn, Flight 390 was officially missing.
Three weeks later, the investigation hit a dead end. Weather had been perfect. No sign of mechanical failure. No distress call.
The final radar coordinates placed the aircraft forty miles northeast of Miami, over open water.
Then came the odd detail.
A mechanic doing maintenance on another TriStar found a small metal panel under the cockpit floor—engraved:
Eastern Airlines — Component Refitted 1973
And beside it, scratched by hand, almost invisible:
“Don’t fly what’s cursed. — D. Repo.”
That name made my stomach turn.
Don Repo was the flight engineer from Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, the one that crashed into the Everglades in December 1972.
Rumor says parts from that wreck were salvaged and reused in other TriStars—including this one.
The legend goes that Repo’s ghost appeared on later flights, warning crews about malfunctions before they happened.
Eastern’s management denied it.
But every pilot knew the stories.
Months passed. The incident was shelved as “unsolved mechanical disappearance.”
I tried to move on. But something about that last transmission kept replaying in my mind—reflection.
One night, about three months after the disappearance, I was on another graveyard shift.
Storms had cleared, the radar was quiet. Around 2:00 AM, a single blip appeared out of nowhere—high altitude, slow-moving, heading south.
Code tag: FL390.
I froze.
That call sign had been retired.
Then the comm line crackled in my headset.
“Miami Center, this is Flight 390… maintaining altitude… request landing clearance.”
My throat went dry. “Flight 390, say again?”
“We’re returning to Miami… hydraulic pressure’s stable now.”
It was Captain Harris’s voice.
I swear to God.
“Flight 390, confirm your position.”
No answer. Only faint static.
Then the same calm third voice—quiet, distant, almost buried under noise:
“Everything’s fixed now.”
The blip faded. The screen cleared.
The room was silent except for the hum of air-conditioning.
When I asked my supervisor if he’d heard it, he said, “Heard what?”
His console had been completely quiet. Only mine had picked it up.
For weeks, I doubted my sanity.
Until another controller—Mike, a veteran like me—pulled me aside during a smoke break.
“You ever hear of Flight 390?” he asked quietly.
I nodded.
He took a long drag of his cigarette.
“Last year, I got a transmission on 121.5—the emergency channel. Guy said, ‘This is Flight 390, inbound Miami, request vector to final.’
I thought it was a prank until I checked radar. There was nothing there.”
He looked me dead in the eyes.
“Whatever’s out there, it knows the procedures. It sounds like a pilot.”
In the years since, it’s happened again. Not often—just once every few years, always around the same date, the night of November 28th.
Controllers on night shift report hearing the same thing:
A faint echo of a transmission. A calm male voice saying—
“This is Flight 390… maintaining altitude… request landing clearance…”
Some say it’s interference, atmospheric reflection, ghost signals bouncing off the ionosphere.
Maybe.
But signals don’t call you by name.
They don’t use your frequency, your tone, your phraseology—like they never stopped flying.
Last winter, I stayed late to finish paperwork. The control room was empty except for the hum of equipment.
It was 23:42—the exact minute Flight 390 vanished thirteen years ago.
Out of habit, I glanced at the radar.
There it was. A lone green blip, altitude thirty-nine thousand feet, code tag: FL390.
I could almost hear the engines in my head, the whine of the TriStar’s Rolls-Royce jets cutting through the night.
Then, clear as day through the static:
“Miami Center, this is Flight 390… Repo fixed it. We’re coming home.”
I wanted to respond. To tell them they’d been gone for over a decade.
But my hands wouldn’t move.
The transmission ended with a soft metallic clink… clink… clink—the same sound I’d heard that first night.
The radar blinked once more, then the blip vanished.
Gone.
They say aviation is about precision, data, logic.
But every now and then, something slips through that no radar or report can explain.
A flight that disappears without trace, yet never truly leaves.
Maybe Flight 390 isn’t gone.
Maybe it’s still up there, circling the night sky, between frequencies—flying a perfect holding pattern that never ends.
And sometimes, if you’re on the late shift, headset pressed to your ear, you’ll catch a whisper through the static:
“Miami Center… maintaining altitude… request landing clearance…”
I’ve learned not to answer.
Because some flights…
should never be cleared to land.
