Anniversary of JAL 123 Mourned By Relatives, Airline Execs

by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

America is often accused of having a culture hostile to ideas of personal responsibility: self-help books, slip-and-fall lawyers, 12-step recovery cults, you name it, that's us. Excuses, excuses, excuses. The converse is often said of Japan: a corporate screw-up that produces stonewalling and indignant, legalistic defiance in the States would instead produce a teary confession and letter of resignation.

So it's probably only in Japan that an airline executive would mark the 20th anniversary of his airline's blackest day by climbing the steep, rugged mountains to the spot where 520 souls that trusted his airline died, victims of a tragic maintenance error.

Toshiyuki Shimmachi, JAL's President, joined other mourners on an anniversary climb to Osutaka Ridge in Gunma Prefecture, north and west of Tokyo, on August 12th. At the top, he laid flowers and uttered an impassioned pledge to the souls of the dead, that he would not permit such a disaster to happen again.

JAL 123 remains a case study in aviation safety courses, and it hovers in the backs of maintenance chiefs' minds, a nightmare waiting to strike. The flight was a routine hop from Tokyo to Osaka when the aft pressure bulkhead blew out; the escaping high-pressure air from the cabin slammed into the vertical stabilizer, which was never built to take pressurization loads from inside.

The vertical stab blew away, leaving enough of a stub to prevent the airplane from tumbling immediately, but not enough to provide positive control. The quadruply-redundant hydraulic systems, all four compromised by the failure, quickly vented their vital fluid overboard.

The pilots were left with only engines for control. Al Haynes and Denny Fitch had pulled it off, sort of, in United 232; but that plane was a trijet where the different thrustlines of the wing and center engines could help out with pitch. JAL 123 was a Boeing 747SR with all its engines under the wings.

"Uncontrol, uncontrol!" the captain reported to enroute traffic control. And despite the flight crew's valiant efforts, and the anxious attempts of ATC to help, the plane hit the side of Osutaka Ridge. The controller at Tokyo watched in horror as the plane's Mode C data block read 8400 feet, an altitude he knew was lower than the terrain, and then went into coast mode.

A Japanese military plane reported to its base "a huge burst of flame in the Nagano mountains." It was the pyre of Flight 123.

Three passengers and one deadheading off-duty stewardess, found underneath the wreckage by Japanese Ground Self Defense Force rescue crews, were the only survivors. 520 others perished in the worst single-plane disaster, ever. (Japanese domestic flights often carry such large numbers. The B-747SR was made for this high-density, short-haul market and seats up to 550 pax and 12 cabin crew; JAL's SRs were configured for 528 pax).

The investigation revealed, though, that JA-8119, the 747SR airframe involved in the crash, had a history. On June 2, 1978, it suffered a violent tail strike which failed, among other parts of the fuselage, the aft pressure bulkhead. The aircraft was repaired by JAL and Boeing mechanics, under the supervision of Boeing engineers.

And they got it wrong. Instead of overlapping a doubler to strengthen the damaged craft, they had divided the doubler into the two pieces, butt-jointed together along the line of the repair. No overlap. Where the original design had three layers of metal joined by multiple rows of rivets, in fact, now, the pressurization loads were borne by a single sheet of metal, joined on each side to the other pieces by only one row of rivets each. The plain was signed off for return to service.

It was a recipe for trouble. The repair lasted for seven years, and thousands of cycles (the machine had 18,830 cycles on it in 25,025 hours). The bulkhead was inspected on no less than six C-Checks (done at 3,000 hour intervals) between the repair and the mishap, and no anomalies were noted. But each cycle was loading the same single row of rivets in shear and tension, and flexing that same single sheet of metal. Failure was inevitable. And when -- not if -- the bulkhead failed, the path of least resistance for the overpressure was into the vertical stab, which was never imagined as a pressure vessel.

JAL, the Japanese corporation, accepted the blame for the mishap. Boeing, the American corporation, fought, but ultimately settled claims of some of the victims of Flight 123.

Every Boeing 747 was inspected, with special attention to ones that had seen hard landings or repairs, or that had high cycles or hours. Boeing designed a change to the tail that allowed internal overpressure to blow out a sacrificial panel, and the world's aviation authorities made it a mandatory AD. The company reviewed and, where necessary, changed, C-check and heavy airframe maintenance procedures.

But JAL's acceptance came in what seems to a Westerner to be uniquely Japanese ways. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, JAL rushed employees, 1,000 of them, to the remote site, to assist in search and rescue efforts. At least one member of the airline's board of directors attended every crew and passenger funeral -- all 520 of them. And a maintenance supervisor at Tokyo's Haneda Airport wrote out a note of apology -- and killed himself.

JAL's then-president, Mr Yasumoto Takagi, tendered his resignation to Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Nakasone accepted the resignation.

Since the accident, a memorial has been constructed on Osutaka Ridge, which is just about as remote and as difficult to get to as it was for the rescuers in 1985. And on the anniversary of the accident -- August 12th -- survivors of the victims, hundreds of them, climb the hill to the memorial. Some pray, some cry, some light candles.

And the president of the company stands with wet eyes and speaks of his company's blackest day, and makes a pledge: never again.

FMI: www.japanair.com, www.jal.co.jp/en/