As Japan’s Transport Safety Board, French investigators and Airbus officials continue to unpick what happened to Japan Airlines Flight JAL 516 after the extraordinary survival of all its passengers and crew in the face of a deadly collision and fire, many around the world will think back to other air crashes and ensuing blazes that ended in tragedy.
This article contains upsetting details.
Manchester disaster
One such incident happened nearly 40 years ago, on 22 August 1985, when a British Airways “Airtours” Boeing 737, about to take off and deliver people to their summer vacation in Corfu suffered an engine failure. Compared to Japan’s Flight 516, the Manchester disaster should have been simple to survive. There had been no collision. The engine failed. The pilots aborted take-off, brought the plane to a standstill and ordered an evacuation. But inside the two aircraft, forty years apart, two very different scenarios played out.
On the Manchester Boeing, the engine fire caused a poisonous cocktail of gases to roll through the cabin. It started at the rear, or aft. Passengers there trying to move to exits became “tangled”, says the official report, as they jostled together “howling and screaming”, choked by fumes, seeking the path to the exits by touch and feel. With the aisle blocked, others tried to climb over seat backs. Panic set in as more and more people seemingly became caught up in the confusion.
Passengers at the front of the plane awaiting their turn to exit could observe this phenomenon as well as something else – the thick black smoke heading their way along the cabin ceiling and curling down towards them, threatening them with the same disorientation and fate.
Only 83 of 158 passengers and crew survived. Among the dead, two young female stewards who died trying to steer people towards exits they couldn’t find.
40 years later
On the Japan Airlines Airbus, nearly 40 years later, mandatory floor lighting lit the way to safety. The public address system may have failed, but crew members had space at the exits and handholds to steady them as they barked instructions through megaphones, with the authority granted to them not only to guide but, if needed, shove people from the plane, and to initiate an evacuation in the first place if no instructions had been forthcoming from the pilots. Passengers too could help to open exits and had instructions on how to do so. These changed safety parameters were in place, in part at least, thanks to industry findings and applied learning from the Manchester disaster.
Another key difference? The aircraft materials. While Airbus’s stock value soared after JAL 516, thanks to confidence inspired, the company stopped short of attributing the successful evacuation to the plane’s materials. But in the past Airbus has pointed out that its A350’s carbon composite fuselage will maintain structural integrity while it burns, instead of melting, buying valuable time.
Learning from tragedy
In the same year as the Manchester disaster, months later in December 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123, JA8119 on its way to Osaka crashed into mountains killing all but four of its 524 passengers and crew. Its aft pressure bulkhead ruptured after a repair years before. All four of the Boeing 737-ST100’s hydraulic lines were severed, resulting in “complete hydraulic pressure loss which severely degraded the airplane’s controllability”, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported.
Resulting recommendations included fail-safe designs to avoid all the hydraulic lines failing at once, but also changes to inspection regimes and safety testing, such as the introduction of more regular visual inspections, as well as X-rays.
Boeing recently lost $13 billion in market value, as industry commentators and whistleblowers began speculating about the company’s alleged removal of key safety inspections and its “rush” to manufacture and supply the 737 MAX 9 (grounded this year due to a cabin door blowout midair).
Like Airbus, Boeing would do well to look back at Manchester, look back at the Osaka mountains too, and remember: taking the time to inspect and to learn from tragedy or near-tragedy has been the history of aviation.
