Okay, Lou, thanks for the additional info!! Everything you said makes good sense. Made me cringe again just thinking about it. I did not know that the accidents in COS and PIT were caused by the same problem. That adds a lot more credibility to the explanation. Back then, when I first heard about the event it was from a TWA Sales guy and he intimated with a wink that the cause was Hoot Gibson's hot dogging. Said he had a reputation and got his nickname for that sort of thing, or something to that effect.

I rode a lot of TW-UA-FL-WA-CO-DL-EA 727s in/out of DEN back then and sweated every flight since the UA SLC 727 crash in the mid 60s. I knew a guy that died on that one.

Bruce