The Fall of Flight 123

(gentle brooding music) (plane alarm beeping) (static crackling) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (First Officer Sasaki speaking in Japanese) (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (thud resounding) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (plane alarm beeping) - Aboard a Japanese passenger flight on the 12th of August, 1985, an alarm begins to sound. Unbeknownst to the pilots, the plane had just undergone a rapid decompression, leaving them scrambling to get the aircraft under control. Over and over, they attempt to maneuver the plane back home.

However, nothing they try seems to work. The airplane is completely unresponsive, yet the over 500 passengers on it have no idea just how dire their situation truly is. On this aircraft, a structural component has undergone a catastrophic failure, a failure caused by a near decade-long oversight, and a failure that would lead to what is now known as the single worst disaster in global aviation history.

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Thank you so much to Incogni for making tonight's video possible. Now let's get to it. (pensive music) It's Monday.

(pensive music) Delta Flight 191 is under investigation after a tragic accident. A string of unsolved murders grips a small town in Washington. And across the pond, in Tokyo, (car engine revving) it's rush hour.

(ethereal music) It is the week of Obon, a Japanese tradition in which they honor their fallen ancestors, and thousands are scrambling through Haneda Airport to get home to their families. At 6:00 PM, Japan Airlines Flight 123 prepares for its fifth flight of the day. This one is full, traveling from Tokyo to Osaka a little under an hour away.

On this day, 49-year-old captain, Masami Takahama, is training his co-pilot, 39-year-old Yutaka Sasaki, in a Boeing 747. The two were joined by a 46-year-old flight engineer named Hiroshi Fukuda in the cockpit and 521 others awaiting this trip in the flights main cabin. In every sense, this flight is entirely routine.

All is going to plan, and they're just a few minutes behind schedule. (airplane zooming) Japan Airlines Flight 123 takes off at 6:12 PM. And as the aircraft powers through the clouds, the passengers look out of their windows to a Tokyo slowly fading.

(passengers faintly speaking) 12 minutes in, and they're nearing the cruising altitude of 24,000 feet. And just as everyone's getting settled in. .

. (metal thuds) (passengers screaming) At 6:25 PM, there's a deafening bang to the rear as the bathroom ceiling collapses. A blinding white light flashes, the water vapor in the air condenses to a fog, and the oxygen masks fall in front of disoriented passengers.

All of this happens in a matter of seconds, sending everyone on board into an unbridled panic. (plane alarm beeping) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) - [Intercom] Put out your cigarettes. This is an emergency descent.

(Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (gentle ominous music) - [Nexpo] The crew begins to realize that the plane has become uncontrollable. After being granted permission to return to Haneda Airport, Captain Takahama panics, questioning why First Officer Sasaki is banking so much in one direction. He commands for him to ease up.

However, all inputs performed by them are unresponsive. As it turns out, all four hydraulic lines leading to the plane's wings are severed. And unbeknownst to them, their vertical stabilizer is completely destroyed.

This plane is flying with no means of stability, and with that, their task of regaining control to land back home safely is borderline unthinkable. Inside the main cabin, a passenger takes one single photo in which we can observe the oxygen masks fully engaged. Unfortunately, the supply is extremely limited, only meant to last long enough for the pilots to descend to a breathable altitude.

What they were unaware of, though, was that the plane found itself stuck in what's known as a phugoid cycle, leaving the crew unable to control their descent, and in a way, unable to descend at all. Over and over, the craft nose dives thousands of feet and rapidly picks up speed before the nose naturally begins to point up, recovering the lost altitude and stalling. It again dives, ascends, dives, and ascends, all while banking at angles of up to 40 degrees in either direction.

By now, the crew is doing everything they can to make their way back to Haneda Airport for an emergency landing, yet the aircraft is doing everything it can to prevent that. (brooding music) (ominous music) The pilots have not utilized their oxygen masks and acute hypoxia has taken its grip. The phugoid cycle is problem number one, yet posing another threat is the ever-encroaching side to side role of the aircraft.

To mitigate this, the crew manages to engage the landing gear, effectively suppressing the phugoid cycle. However, over the course of the next five minutes, the plane descends over 10,000 feet while rolling at an angle of over 40 degrees. Effectively, they achieve a complete 360 degree downward spiral over the town of Otsuki, and understandably losing hope as every critical second bleeds by.

(ominous music) (air traffic controller speaking in Japanese) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (air traffic controller speaking in Japanese) (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) - [Captain Takahama] Turn right! (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) Right turn! (Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) Right turn.

(Captain Takahama and Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) Left turn. (Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (plane alarm beeping) (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) Max power! Max power!

Max power! (Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (First Officer Sasaki speaking in Japanese) (Engineer Fukuda speaking in Japanese) (ominous music) - [Nexpo] The plane has dropped to a mere 6,800 feet. They are now heading opposite of Haneda Airport and straight towards Mount Takamagahara.

Over the next five minutes, the crew fights to gain altitude to move away from this impending threat and manages to climb again to 11,000 feet. False hope, this is, however, as they find themselves in yet another downward spiral. This time, right over treacherous terrain.

(alarm beeping) - [GWPS] Pull up! (Captain Takahama speaking in Japanese) (alarm beeping) - [GWPS] Pull up! (alarm beeping) - [GWPS] Pull up!

(brooding music) (rain pattering) (rain pattering) (crickets chirping) (helicopter buzzing) (ominous music) In the quaint village of Ueno nestled in the mountainside, residents awaken to a lingering odor. In the air, rescue and news helicopters zoom by as they discern something the locals don't. On the ground, rows of trucks and buses are on the move, while crowds gather in gaze in utter confusion.

Yet amidst all of this, hardly anyone knew the gravity of what was happening. 21 miles southwest of their location, the remains of Japan Airlines Flight 123 are burning and are scattered across the mountainside. The plane is completely shredded.

The landscape wounded. And to say that this scene was grim is a criminal understatement. (ominous music) Out of the 524 passengers on board that night, only four survived.

This was the worst loss of life involving a single aircraft in the history of aviation. This incident is devastating, and the most frustrating aspect of all of this is that it did not have to turn out this way at all. You see, just 20 minutes after impact, a US Air Force serviceman named Michael Antonucci spotted and phoned in the crash location.

However, instead of making the call to lend support immediately, the Japanese military called off the rescue operation under the presumption that none a single passenger survived. For over 12 hours, the plane burned throughout the night, a handful still alive and awaiting help from numerous aircraft that passed right above them. Aircraft that saw them, yet they were completely unaware that help was never coming.

One of the four survivors named Yumi Ochiai later recalled their experience from that evening, explaining how throughout the night, they could hear children crying, adults screaming. It was loud at first. Yet as the hours went by, these pleas slowly faded into silence.

Some fell out of consciousness, some lost the energy to continue. But for the vast majority, this stillness signaled the agonizing death of lives that could have been helped. It took 12 hours in total for rescuers to arrive, yet by then, the scene was a gruesome graveyard.

A Japanese medical doctor stated that had this rescue come 10 hours earlier, perhaps they would've found more survivors. But it was silent. (gentle music) In the years following the incident, no one would fly in Japan Air, resulting in the company taking a massive hit in revenue.

With this, both the airline and the Boeing company would pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to the victim's families over time a reparation immaterial in the grand scheme of this tragedy. Even then, however, guilt festered in the minds of Japan Air employees as two of them, a 59-year-old maintenance official named Hiroo Tominaga, and a 57-year-old inspector named Susumu Tajima, would later take their own lives, with the former leaving a note with just a single phrase, "I am atoning with my death. " In the end, investigators attributed the tragedy to improper repairs to the plane's aft pressure bulkhead, the rear component of the pressure seal present in all aircraft.

It was learned that seven years prior, the same aircraft encountered a tails strike incident during a landing, cracking the bulkhead and rendering the plane unflyable. During repair, the engineers planned to utilize a large splice plate to connect the two sides of the crack while reinforcing it with three rows of solid rivets. When done correctly, this would reestablish the full structural integrity of the wall, rendering it just as safe as it was before for flight.

In reality, however, the repair did not go this way at all. Instead of using one splice plate, Boeing's repair technicians used tomb in parallel to the crack, effectively rendering one entire section of rivets completely useless. This oversight was never discovered and the plane flew in this condition over 12,000 times.

(gentle music) (gentle somber music) This tragedy echoes through the lives of everyone involved and is one of the most unspeakable catastrophes that should have been prevented. It's hard to grasp the sheer horror of experiencing a plane crash, let alone surviving it. Those who did had to endure a trauma and a loss that is unimaginable.

The agonizing moments afterward crushed under wreckage, helpless under the night sky, effectively forgotten in a blazing wilderness. I feel horrible for everyone on onboard that fateful night and for the families and friends that were eagerly waiting for them. Obon is typically a time of communion, an annual reconnection with seldom seen loved ones.

But for the 520 victims who lost their lives that night, they were never able to finish their journey to see them. Their families awaited those that would never show, and their memory is forever stained by an incident that never should have happened. That night, there was nothing anyone could have done, no way they could have known.

But in the wake of it all, one thing is certain. Their memory, their lives, will forever be cherished by those that loved them, and their legacy will forever endure until the end of time.