Eastern Air Lines Flight 512 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight operated by Eastern Air Lines from Charlotte Municipal Airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Idlewild Airport in New York City.

An investigation launched after the crash found that the probable cause of the accident was that the pilots had made critical mistakes during the go-around that prevented the aircraft from gaining altitude.

[1]: 2  Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) notifications had made the crew aware that the precision approach radar system at the airport was out of service.

Instead, the tower reported visibility of one mile (one point six kilometers),[2] although flight crews would have likely heard radio traffic from other pilots describing the poor conditions.

[1]: 18  Rules that were in effect at the airport required a visibility of at least 2,000 feet (610 m) for a runway to remain open.

[1]: 11 [5][2] After the crash, emergency vehicles were dispatched to the accident site, but they were delayed by the thick fog and the soft marshy terrain where the aircraft ended up.

[5] One ambulance driver reported that visibility was as low as five feet (two meters), which made it difficult to locate the crash victims.

[5] The arrival of some of the emergency vehicles from areas outside the airport was delayed by slow-moving traffic on nearby roads.

[1]: i  He had been employed at Eastern Air Lines since April 1945 and had logged a total of 15,644 hours of flight time, including 2,700 on the DC-7 type aircraft.

[5] An additional crew member who was not working this flight occupied the jump seat in the cockpit and was also killed.

[7] Fournier had started her employment with Eastern Air Lines in April 1962, and was on only her third flight at the time of the crash.

In it, they found that the probable cause of the accident was the technique employed by the crew during their abandonment of the aircraft's approach in the unexpected fog conditions.

[1]: 1  The board concluded that if the crew had either rotated the aircraft to a higher nose-up position, or had used more engine power, the plane's descent would have been arrested and the accident avoided.