On January 6, 1960, NAL Airlines Flight 2511 departed Idlewild Airport (today known as JFK) for a nonstop flight to Miami, Florida with 34 passengers and crew aboard.  The original aircraft was scheduled to be a Boeing 707; however, it was taken out of service due to a cracked windscreen. Two smaller reserve aircraft were brought in, and two hours later, the last flight took off and headed for Miami.  It never arrived.

 At 2:31 in the morning, as the plane crossed over the coast near Wilmington, North Carolina, the crew radioed, stating everything was fine and they were flying along at 18,000 feet. Less than twenty minutes later the plane crashed in a farmer's field near the rural town of Bolivia, North Carolina only 22 short miles from Wilmington, killing everyone aboard.

 The Civil Aeronautics Board (the precursor to the NTSB) immediately departed for the scene, as did the FBI. While the CAB investigated the aircraft and the crash itself, the FBI began a preliminary investigation of its own in the event it should need to step in. The CAB determined that the aircraft was brought down by a dynamite explosion on board the aircraft inside the passenger cabin. Or was it?

 The FBI's own assessment at the crash site seemed to be somewhat different, indicating to them that the culprit very well could have been a propeller that broke mid-flight and impacted the side of the aircraft, depressurizing it and causing the aircraft to literally rip itself apart.  It was eventually proven by the CAB that the aircraft was indeed brought down by a dynamite explosion on board however, many questions remain even though the case was closed years later without directly assigning blame to anyone.

 The main question at the time was, of course, who is responsible and why?  Was it a man named Julian Frank, who was a  New York City lawyer about to be disbarred and go to jail, or was it somebody targeting a  Cuban banker who was reportedly high up in Fidel Castro's organization?  There were also hints of a  mysterious person from South America aboard who was tied to revolutionaries and came to the United States under the pretense of making an arms deal.  

Sounds like the makings of a good fiction book! Doesn't it? Well, the only problem is this is 100% TRUE. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I have acquired well over 500 pages of testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and memos on the crash of Flight 2511. I have spent months reading everything I can find and compiling a comprehensive timeline of events surrounding the flight, crash, and investigation of Flight 2511, and the results are shocking, to say the least.