On the evening of April 4, 1979 while flying over Saginaw, Michigan, the Boeing 727-31 airliner began a sharp, uncommanded roll to the right, and subsequently went into a spiral dive.

The pilots were able to regain control of the aircraft and made an emergency landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

[1][2]: 8 In command was Captain Harvey G. "Hoot" Gibson, aged 44, who had logged a total of 15,710 piloting hours, 2,597 of them on the 727.

A few seconds after extending the gear, Gibson managed to regain control and pulled the 727 out of its dive at about 5,000 feet (1,500 m).

[5][6] The plane suffered substantial structural damage with the No.7 leading-edge slat and a flight spoiler having detached, the right outboard aileron hinge fitting broke due to metal fatigue resulting in free-play, and the System A hydraulics ruptured due to the right main gear overextending which also broke the sidebrace and actuator support beam; the Flight Engineer reported they had a fail flag for the lower rudder yaw damper[2]: 10  but made an emergency landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan at 10:31 p.m. EST without further trouble.

[2]: 4  The flight crew would be questioned on three occasions during the course of the entire investigation: hours after landing in Detroit, on April 12, 1979, and on January 29, 1980.

[8] After eliminating all known sources of mechanical failure, the NTSB concluded in June 1981 in its final report, that the probable cause of the accident was the isolated extension of the No.

7 leading-edge slat from the flight crew manipulating the flap/slat controls in an inappropriate manner leading to an uncommanded roll to the right and the captain's untimely action.

Harvey G. "Hoot" Gibson (1934–2015),[10] First Officer J. Scott Kennedy (1939–2017),[11] and Flight Engineer Gary N. Banks (born 1942), denied that their actions had been the cause of the flaps' extension: At no time prior to the incident did I take any action within the cockpit either intentionally or inadvertently, that would have caused the extension of the leading edge slats or trailing edge flaps.

[2]: 18  Records after 1974 did include two report slat extensions between 1974 and towards the end of the NTSB's investigation in 1981, one of which was inadvertently caused by the flight crew.

[citation needed] The aircraft was equipped with a Fairchild Industries Model A-100 cockpit voice recorder (CVR).

[2]: 6  In a deposition taken by the Safety Board, the captain stated that he usually activates the bulk-erase feature on the CVR at the conclusion of each flight to preclude inappropriate use of recorded conversations.

[2]: 6  Pilot and author Emilio Corsetti III suggested in his book Scapegoat: A Flight Crew's Journey From Heroes to Villains to Redemption, that the wiring to the CVR could have been damaged by the heavy, 6 G-force pull out.

The NTSB made the following statement in the accident report while also acknowledging that the upset and the events leading up to it would not have been recorded:[2]: 33 We believe the captain's erasure of the CVR is a factor we cannot ignore and cannot sanction.

Our skepticism persists even though the CVR would not have contained any contemporaneous information about the events that immediately preceded the loss of control because we believe it probable that the 25 minutes or more of recording which preceded the landing at Detroit could have provided clues about causal factors and might have served to refresh the flightcrew's memories about the whole matter.In ALPA's 1990 petition to the NTSB to reconsider their findings, an analysis conducted by ALPA concluded that the No.

As the aileron floated up, the plane banked to the right and turned off its heading, the autopilot tried to correct for this by moving the control wheel left.

Although Gibson disconnected the autopilot and applied opposite aileron and upper rudder, with the lower rudder in the hardover position and limited roll control due to the right outboard aileron free-floating, his control inputs were insufficient to prevent TWA 841 from going into an uncontrollable spiral dive.

[16][verification needed] In his book Emergency: Crisis In the Cockpit,[3] Stanley Stewart, a pilot, asserted the following about the NTSB's findings: Emilio Corsetti III stated in his book, Scapegoat: A Flight Crew's Journey From Heroes to Villains to Redemption,[4] that the Boeing engineers and NTSB investigators had massaged the data to make it match what they thought happened, not the flight crew's version of events;[4]: 192  and stated that "had the NTSB not let the supposed erasure of the CVR implant a bias on the investigation, they might have considered possibilities other than crew involvement.

[17] The accident was featured on season 22 of the Canadian documentary series Mayday, in the episode titled "Terror over Michigan".