Originally Posted by ESpen36

American Airlines Flight 48 had just taken off from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, at the start of a nine-hour overnight flight to Paris on April 20, when flight attendants heard an alarming noise from the bottom of the plane. According to one source, the sound was of “vibrating, shaking, even some ripping.”

Alerted to the noise by flight attendants, the trio of pilots in the cockpit -- two of them Miami-based -- considered their options. One of the pilots got on a phone line to the dispatch center at American headquarters in Fort Worth and then to the maintenance center in Tulsa. According to an internal memo from an unidentified flight safety official, “the pilots and TUL Tech thought [the sounds] may have been [from] a cargo shift of some sort.”