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 40 years ago, 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, 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.
The aircraft involved in the accident photographed one year previously in 1984 – Kjell Nilsson
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.
Emergency services at the crash site of Japan Airlines Flight 123 on Mount Takamagahara – Getty
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.
Relatives of the dead gather at the crash site every August 12 – Getty
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.