Japan: The Worst Single Day

Death haunted the skies of Japan last week. Near towering Mount Fuji, a British Overseas Airways’ Boeing 707 fell from the sky, killing all 124 persons on board. Only the day before, a Canadian Pacific DC-8 crashed while landing in heavy fog at Tokyo Airport, killing the ten-member crew and all but eight of the 62 passengers. This total of 188 in less than 24 hours made it, as far as anyone could remember, the darkest single day in the history of commercial aviation.

And that was not all of it: two Japanese crewmen died when their S-58 helicopter toppled into Tokyo Bay while on a search for bodies from last month’s worst single-plane disaster in history, the crash of the All Nippon Airways’ 727 that killed 133 persons. Among all the crashes, there were few, if any, marks of similarity.

BOAC’s flight 911 had taken off in perfect weather twelve minutes before the disaster from Tokyo International and had climbed to 6,000 feet. The passengers were probably peering out the starboard windows for a glimpse of the mountain. Among them were 75 dealers and executives with their wives from Minneapolis’ Thermo King Corp., on a 14-day company-paid tour of the Far East, a reward for outstanding sales. Suddenly witnesses on the ground saw the plane belch white, then black, smoke. To some it seemed to come apart in midair, pieces of wing and tail fluttering to earth like dry leaves. Presumed cause: either a mid-air explosion or disintegration as a result of turbulence from the very strong gusts of wind that prevailed around Mount Fuji that afternoon.

Ironically, the doomed 707 had just taxied out for its takeoff past the wreckage of Canadian Pacific’s Hong Kong-to-Tokyo flight. On the night before, it circled fog-closed Tokyo International for nearly an hour, hoping for a break in the overcast. Finally, its pilot gave up and informed the control tower and his passengers that he was making for Taiwan, 1,300 miles to the southwest. At that moment, the visibility momentarily increased to five-eighths of a mile at the airport, just above the minimum safety standard, and the pilot elected to land instead.

His radar-directed approach was perfect until he was only a few hundred yards short of the runway. Then the control-tower radar scanner saw in horror that the huge DC-8 suddenly had sunk twenty feet below the correct glide path. “Level off,” commanded the tower operator. Seconds later, the plane dropped off the radar screen. Too low, the plane’s wheels apparently snagged on the breakwater at the edge of the runway, sending the DC-8 cartwheeling down the field.