How four people survived the second-deadliest plane crash that killed 520
One of the world's deadliest plane disasters struck four decades ago when the passenger jet carrying 524 people crashed shortly after takeoff.
Four people, including an eight-year-old child, miraculously escaped the decimated wreckage after the Boeing 747SR-46 plane crashed onto a remote mountain area of Mount Takamagahara.
The Japan Airlines flight 123, known as JAL123, remains Japan's worst aviation accident to date.
It has been dubbed the Titanic of Japan's aviation world.
This is the story of the doomed Japan Airlines flight 123 that will never be forgotten.
The Boeing plane took off from Tokyo Haneda Airport and headed towards Itami, Osaka, as usual on August 12, 1985.
The plane was packed with families flying on their summer vacations to escape the hot and humid Tokyo weather – a total of 509 passengers and a 15-strong crew.
But just 12 minutes after takeoff, parts of the plane exploded due to decompression, causing the ceiling near the toilets to collapse and tearing a hole in the fuselage designed to protect the passengers.
To make matters worse, the explosion damaged the tail fin and the four hydraulic lines on the plane, causing it to rise and fall uncontrollably after the pilots had declared an emergency.
For a terrifying 30 minutes, the pilots fought to regain control of the plane, which climbed and fell again as they attempted to return to Tokyo.
Meanwhile, passengers began to accept their fate and wrote final messages to their loved ones.
But the out-of-control plane continued to descend and got closer to the mountains, where it crashed and exploded.
It took rescue crews more than 15 hours to get to the crash site, where four survivors, all women, had managed to stay alive.
Off-duty flight attendant Yumi Ochiai, mum Hiroko Yoshizaki, 34, with her eight-year-old daughter Mikiko, and Keiko Kawakai, 12, who lost her family in the crash. Keiko was shot out of the plane on impact and catapulted into a tree, where she was found with serious injuries.
All four had sat in the rear of the aircraft.
The women were seated in the final rows – from 54 to row 60.
Yumi recalled the final moments in the plane before everything went silent: 'After the crash, I heard harsh panting and gasping noises from many people. I hear it coming from everywhere, all around me. There was a boy crying 'mother.' I clearly heard a young woman saying 'Come quickly!'.'
The JAL123 disaster is known as Japan's aviation industry's equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic, Christopher Hood, a fellow at the University of Bath's Centre for Death and Society, said.
Hood, who has written a book about the crash and spent a night at the crash site to get into the shoes of the survivors, said as many as 100 people might have survived the impact.
'If the rescue teams arrive sooner, there would have been more survivors. The survivors there knew it was getting quieter and quieter. Fifteen hours is a long time.'
He said the lack of GPS at the time contributed to possible miscalculations as search aircraft relayed the location back to the control tower in degrees and miles, but 'the problem is the speed they are going at, making it it difficult to judge and there's a margin of error. With degrees, one degree makes a 1-2km difference already.
'And the defence force reported back in nautical miles, while Japan uses kilometres. It was the perfect storm and it was a mountainous area.'
The Japanese society is less interested in the individual survivours than often is the case in the UK and US, Hood explained.
Most of the media attention focused on the 12-year-old Keiko, who became a nurse and helped victims when an earthquake hit.
Hood said the cause of the crash is still debated to this day.
While the official cause is a faulty repair to the bulkhead, which led to the decompression explosion, an alternative theory is that air was leaking out slowly, which the tail was not designed to take, eventually causing it to break.
A wilder theory, which has been debunked, is that the plane was hit by a missile, which then led to cover-up attempts.
Hood said the same plane had been involved in an accident in 1978, claiming that the repairs were done 'incorrectly.'
He told Metro the impact of the crash was 'huge' in 1985, and it has been etched in the society's consciousness.
'The list of passengers was read on TV, and this is how many people found out about their loved one,' Hood said.
He said: 'It is the deadliest single plane crash, and it had an incredible number of people for a domestic flight. Imagine this happening on a flight from London to Edinburgh.
'The crash happened on August 12, which is like the day of the dead or Halloween, and it added symbolism. There were famous people on board, and so many people connect themselves to the crash with one or two steps.' More Trending
The disaster struck just days after the 40th anniversary of the brutal atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which added to the collective pain.
Hood said the next generations in Japan will learn about the disaster and interest will 'only grow rather than go away.'
'And families are keen for it to be reported. This crash has become the figurehead of all transport accidents.'
Every year, people gather at the JAL123 at the Osutaka ridge in the Ueno village, with this year marking 40 years.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
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The Sun
21 hours ago
- The Sun
Final pics show Japan Airlines Flight 123 mins before crash that left 520 dead… & the critical failure that spelled doom
FOUR decades on, the doomed Japan Airlines Flight 123 crash remains one of the world's worst aviation disasters of all time. Haunting final pictures show the jet just moments before it crashed because of a critical failure - killing 520 people on board. 7 7 Tragedy struck on August 12, 1985 when the Boeing 747SR-46 jet crashed just 62 miles northwest of Tokyo. On board the jet were 509 passengers and 15 crew members. Only four of them survived. The flight, dubbed the "Titanic of Japan", took off from Tokyo and was headed to Osaka but tragically crashed in the remote area of remote mountain area of Mount Takamagahara. And to date, it remains the worst disaster in the history of Japanese aviation. One of the last few pictures shows the Jet missing its tailfin. Another picture, thought to be the final picture taken on board, shows oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling. It is thought that the plane was perfectly fine, and the journey began normally after all the routine checks. But just 12 minutes after takeoff, First Officer Yutaka Sasaki and Captain Masami Takahama noticed a tremor tear through the plane. The jet decompressed rapidly, which caused the ceiling near the rear bathrooms to collapse. How pilots cutting engines sparked TWO plane disasters after South Korea & India crashes as calls for cockpit CCTV grow It extensively damaged the fuselage and destroyed the plane's vertical stabiliser and all four hydraulic lines. Moments after the tremor was detected, the air condensed into a fog, forcing the oxygen masks down. For a terrifying 30 minutes, the pilots fought hard to claim control of the plane, but the jet was in a vicious and disorienting cycle of falling and then rising. Passengers shouted as they were thrown around the plane by the rapid spiralling, while the pilots fought to bring the jet to safety. But the out-of-control plane continued to descend and got closer to the mountains, where it crashed and exploded. 7 According to reports, Captain Takahama made a last-ditch effort to keep the aircraft aloft by using the engine thrust to ascend and fall. He is believed to have yelled: "This is the end!" Around 20 minutes after impact, US Air Force serviceman Michael Antonucci reported the crash site. In the aftermath of the crash, the search and rescue efforts were delayed, and survivors were not found until several hours later. This delay likely contributed to the high death toll, as some victims who survived the initial impact died before help could arrive. Japanese officials delayed sending a rescue crew, assuming that no one had survived, and told Antonucci not to discuss the disaster. 7 7 7 The Japanese military only sent rescue teams in the following morning, a whole 12 hours after the crash had been reported. Antonucci revealed a decade later: "Four people survived. Many more could have. "At the time it occurred, I was ordered not to speak about it." One doctor involved in the rescue mission said: "If the discovery had come 10 hours earlier, we could have found more survivors." Yumi Ochiai, a survivor, claimed to have heard other survivors wailing all through the night, until the intense cold finally got to them. Antonucci added that had it "not been for efforts to avoid embarrassing Japanese authorities", a team of US Marines could have searched the wreckage less than two hours after the crash. The puzzle began to come together as more teams were dispatched to retrieve body and plane parts. Two years later, after a comprehensive investigation, Japan's Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission determined that the decompression was caused by a botched repair by Boeing workers. The same aircraft had thudded heavily upon landing at Itami Airport in June 1978, causing extensive tail damage. The impact also cracked open the pressure bulkhead, necessitating immediate repairs. However, Boeing's repair personnel utilised two spice plates parallel to the break in the bulkhead instead of one, rendering the repair job worthless. According to Ron Schleede, a member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, the crew did everything they could to avoid the disaster, which was "inevitable". World's Worst Air Disasters Tenerife Airport Disaster, 1977 On March 27, 1977, on the island of Tenerife two Boeing 747 jets collided on the runway in the deadliest accident in aviation history. The accident occurred as a result of heady mix bombings, organisational issues and fog. A bomb explosion at the airport on Gran Canaria caused many flights to be diverted Los Rodeos Airport on the popular holiday island. Among two of the flights affected were KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, neither would leave the island. 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Metro
2 days ago
- Metro
How four people survived the second-deadliest plane crash that killed 520
Only four people were pulled out alive from the wreckage of the doomed Japan Airlines flight 123 after it crashed on a mountainside. One of the world's deadliest plane disasters struck four decades ago when the passenger jet carrying 524 people crashed shortly after takeoff. Four people, including an eight-year-old child, miraculously escaped the decimated wreckage after the Boeing 747SR-46 plane crashed onto a remote mountain area of Mount Takamagahara. The Japan Airlines flight 123, known as JAL123, remains Japan's worst aviation accident to date. It has been dubbed the Titanic of Japan's aviation world. This is the story of the doomed Japan Airlines flight 123 that will never be forgotten. The Boeing plane took off from Tokyo Haneda Airport and headed towards Itami, Osaka, as usual on August 12, 1985. The plane was packed with families flying on their summer vacations to escape the hot and humid Tokyo weather – a total of 509 passengers and a 15-strong crew. But just 12 minutes after takeoff, parts of the plane exploded due to decompression, causing the ceiling near the toilets to collapse and tearing a hole in the fuselage designed to protect the passengers. To make matters worse, the explosion damaged the tail fin and the four hydraulic lines on the plane, causing it to rise and fall uncontrollably after the pilots had declared an emergency. For a terrifying 30 minutes, the pilots fought to regain control of the plane, which climbed and fell again as they attempted to return to Tokyo. Meanwhile, passengers began to accept their fate and wrote final messages to their loved ones. But the out-of-control plane continued to descend and got closer to the mountains, where it crashed and exploded. It took rescue crews more than 15 hours to get to the crash site, where four survivors, all women, had managed to stay alive. Off-duty flight attendant Yumi Ochiai, mum Hiroko Yoshizaki, 34, with her eight-year-old daughter Mikiko, and Keiko Kawakai, 12, who lost her family in the crash. Keiko was shot out of the plane on impact and catapulted into a tree, where she was found with serious injuries. All four had sat in the rear of the aircraft. The women were seated in the final rows – from 54 to row 60. Yumi recalled the final moments in the plane before everything went silent: 'After the crash, I heard harsh panting and gasping noises from many people. I hear it coming from everywhere, all around me. There was a boy crying 'mother.' I clearly heard a young woman saying 'Come quickly!'.' The JAL123 disaster is known as Japan's aviation industry's equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic, Christopher Hood, a fellow at the University of Bath's Centre for Death and Society, said. Hood, who has written a book about the crash and spent a night at the crash site to get into the shoes of the survivors, said as many as 100 people might have survived the impact. 'If the rescue teams arrive sooner, there would have been more survivors. The survivors there knew it was getting quieter and quieter. Fifteen hours is a long time.' He said the lack of GPS at the time contributed to possible miscalculations as search aircraft relayed the location back to the control tower in degrees and miles, but 'the problem is the speed they are going at, making it it difficult to judge and there's a margin of error. With degrees, one degree makes a 1-2km difference already. 'And the defence force reported back in nautical miles, while Japan uses kilometres. It was the perfect storm and it was a mountainous area.' The Japanese society is less interested in the individual survivours than often is the case in the UK and US, Hood explained. Most of the media attention focused on the 12-year-old Keiko, who became a nurse and helped victims when an earthquake hit. Hood said the cause of the crash is still debated to this day. While the official cause is a faulty repair to the bulkhead, which led to the decompression explosion, an alternative theory is that air was leaking out slowly, which the tail was not designed to take, eventually causing it to break. A wilder theory, which has been debunked, is that the plane was hit by a missile, which then led to cover-up attempts. Hood said the same plane had been involved in an accident in 1978, claiming that the repairs were done 'incorrectly.' He told Metro the impact of the crash was 'huge' in 1985, and it has been etched in the society's consciousness. 'The list of passengers was read on TV, and this is how many people found out about their loved one,' Hood said. He said: 'It is the deadliest single plane crash, and it had an incredible number of people for a domestic flight. Imagine this happening on a flight from London to Edinburgh. 'The crash happened on August 12, which is like the day of the dead or Halloween, and it added symbolism. There were famous people on board, and so many people connect themselves to the crash with one or two steps.' More Trending The disaster struck just days after the 40th anniversary of the brutal atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which added to the collective pain. Hood said the next generations in Japan will learn about the disaster and interest will 'only grow rather than go away.' 'And families are keen for it to be reported. This crash has become the figurehead of all transport accidents.' Every year, people gather at the JAL123 at the Osutaka ridge in the Ueno village, with this year marking 40 years. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Virgin Atlantic relaunches flights to 'iconic' winter sun destination after 6 years MORE: 'Europe's Hawaii' that's often dubbed a 'Canaries alternative' is having a record-breaking year MORE: Emirates announces flight rule change that will affect every passenger from October 2025
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
The forgotten story of the world's deadliest plane crash
Tragedy generally hits hardest close to home, where the places and locations in question can trigger grief and trauma long after the initial event has slipped queasily into the past. Which might explain why the collective British memory does not easily recall the deadliest plane crash of all time: a catastrophe that took place more than 8,000 miles away, on the other side of the planet, but claimed 520 lives. It did so an exact 40 years ago today, on August 12 1985, on a wild mountainside, 60 miles north-west of Tokyo. The fate of Flight 123 is certainly not forgotten in Japan, where the scarring is still visible (there will be commemorations at the crash site today, as there are every year). True, its loss of life did not match the 583 victims of the Tenerife Air Disaster of March 27 1977, where two Boeing 747s collided on the runway on the largest of the Canary Islands. Nor does it equate to the unique circumstances of the two Boeing 767s flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11 2001. But Flight 123 holds its own dark position in the annals of aviation – as the deadliest crash involving a single aircraft. A ticking time bomb Perhaps inevitably, with a fatality count of such awful weight, that aircraft was also a 747 – specifically a 747 SR-46, toiling away for Japan Airlines (JAL). 'SR' stands for 'short range', with the plane part of the boom in domestic flights in the Land of the Rising Sun that took hold in the early 1970s. Demand was so high that, in 1972, JAL placed an order with Boeing for a bespoke version of the 'Jumbo Jet' – one adapted for maximum passenger capacity, but with strengthened body structure and landing gear able to cope with the regular take-offs and landings (and considerable stress) inherent in short-haul flying. So it was that the 747 SR-46 emerged from Boeing's Seattle plant with space for 498 travellers; a figure that would rise to 550 after further modification. It made its first commercial flight, for JAL, on October 7 1973. JA8119 – to use its registration number – arrived in the JAL fleet in 1974, and promptly became a workhorse. By the time of its demise in 1985, it had chalked up 25,000 hours of flying, and 18,800 flights; the majority of them quick trips back and forth between Tokyo and Japan's other major cities. Flight 123 – a scheduled service from Haneda Airport in the capital to Itami Airport in Osaka, which should have taken one hour – was the fifth of six short hops it was due to make that day. However, the cause of the disaster was not rooted in that summer afternoon in the mid-1980s. It had been planted seven years earlier – and with a grim symmetry, on the same route. On June 2 1978, JA8119 was damaged by a heavy touch-down at Itami. The landing was so jarring that the 747's tail hit the runway (a 'tailstrike') – so forcefully that this caused cracking in the rear bulkhead, a vital component of any plane's pressurisation system. The breakage was repaired, swiftly but – it would transpire – insufficiently. JA8119 had 8,830 hours on its log at the time of the strike, and would fly on, without much further incident, for 16,170 more. Yet deep within its fuselage, a clock was ticking. The death toll from the crash was tragically inflated by unfortunate timing: August 12 1985 fell within Obon season – a celebration of ancestral spirits, effectively Japan's 'Day of the Dead', which moves around the calendar, but generally sees the Japanese travel home in great numbers to spend time with loved ones. So it was that JA8119 was full of families for its early-evening departure. The records indicate that, of the 524 passengers and crew on board, 502 were Japanese. They included one notable celebrity – the 43-year-old singer and actor, Kyu Sakamoto. 32 unthinkable minutes JA8119 took off from Haneda at 6.12pm, a little behind schedule. For the next 12 minutes, it proceeded as normal. But at 6.24pm, as the 747 SR-46 crossed the coastal waters of Sagami Bay, 50 miles south-west of Tokyo, the decade-old patch-up job on its rear bulkhead finally failed. The plane suffered an explosive decompression which brought down the ceiling at the back of the economy cabin, severed all four hydraulic lines and knocked out the vertical stabiliser. At a stroke, the jet was all but uncontrollable. At the opposite end of the aircraft, Captain Masami Takahama – a 49-year-old pilot of significant experience – remained calm. A distress call was put out; an emergency plan to turn Flight 123 around and return to Haneda was discussed. But it soon became clear that JA8119 was incapable of nuanced manoeuvre. Cockpit recordings suggest its crew was already beginning to suffer from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the decompressing jet leading to slow answers and an audible difficulty in comprehending instructions. In the 21 minutes which followed the explosion, JA8119 flew erratically, lurching and rolling, gaining and losing altitude – and, crucially, swerving north, so that it was back over land. Its final 11 minutes were a desperate struggle. By 6.45pm, the jet was descending rapidly, had plunged to 13,500ft (4,100m), and was veering towards high mountains. At 6.46pm, Takahama was heard to utter the weary words: 'This may be hopeless.' At 6.49pm, there was a brief stall, at 9,000ft (2,700m). And while this was corrected, seven minutes later, at 6.56pm, JA8119 clipped a ridge on 1,979m Mount Takamagahara in Japan's central Gunma Prefecture. The collision dislodged the end third of the right wing, and two of the four engines. Now conclusively disabled, the 747 flipped onto its back, struck a second ridge, and exploded. The impact was so violent that it registered on the seismometer at the Shin-Etsu Earthquake Observatory, 100 miles away. It is impossible to say how many people were still alive in the immediate aftermath of the crash, because the rescue mission was as poorly executed as the repair work that had led to the disaster. It was still daytime when JA8119 went into the mountain, but as the light faded, a Japanese military helicopter did a cursory scan of the site, and reported no obvious signs of life. With night imminent, and the terrain challenging, paramedics did not attempt to reach the wreckage until the following morning. Interviewed in her hospital bed, Yumi Ochiai, an off-duty flight attendant who was one of just four survivors – all female; all of whom had been sitting on the left hand side of the cabin, between rows 54 and 60 – remembered seeing lights and listening to the noise of rotor blades after waking up in the charred remains of the plane. She expected help to arrive, she said, but the only sounds she heard for the next few hours were the cries of the injured and dying. The fallout The government response was rather more clear-eyed. The official inquiry, which released its findings on June 19 1987, placed the blame on the inadequate repair in 1978. By that point, JAL president Yasumoto Takagi had already lost his job; he tendered his resignation on August 24 1985, less than a fortnight after the crash. Sadly, the catastrophe claimed two further victims as its aftershocks reverberated around Japan. Two JAL employees – maintenance manager Hiroo Tominaga, and engineer Susumu Tajima, who had inspected JA8119 after the tailstrike incident, and had declared it airworthy – took their own lives, buckling beneath the psychological burden of the disaster. Forty years on, the crash site is home to a memorial; two unadorned stone triangles, set against the slope. The relatives of the dead gather there every August 12, perhaps taking small consolation from Mount Takamagahara's place in Japanese folklore as a parallel to Greece's Mount Olympus; a heavenly home of the gods. There are more tangible echoes as well. Not least the Safety Promotion Center, a museum attached to Haneda Airport, which examines the causes of the disaster, and the lessons to be learnt from it. Among its artefacts are fragments of the plane, and farewell letters written by its passengers in the 32 unthinkable minutes when they were probably aware that they were going to die. JAL has recovered to be Japan's second biggest airline, but suffered an inevitable decline in the wake of Flight 123; passenger numbers fell by a third in the next year, as a wary public avoided the brand. Nonetheless, not everyone affected by the crash was put off flying. Captain Takahama's daughter Yoko became a flight attendant, working for JAL.
