at about 6.30pm on august 12, 1985, a japan airlines-owned boeing 747-sr46 – a massive boat of a plane, capable of holding 550 people for the hour-long short-haul trip between tokyo and osaka – broadcast a distress signal.  the flight was packed, at 509 passengers and 15 crew, filled with merry travelers flying home for bon, a buddhist holiday during which many people visit their ancestral homes to honor generations past.  soon after reaching cruising altitude, a small explosion ripped the vertical stabiliser from the rear bulkhead and tore through the plane’s hydraulic systems, the mechanisms needed to control the roll, pitch, and yaw of the plane.  the 747 began a cycle of dropping steeply, then climbing sharply.  it took an erratic path over land and water as the pilots attempted to control it using engine thrust, and it managed one good upswing before dropping from 13,000 feet directly into mount takamagahara; upon impact, it flipped and crashed again onto its back, splitting into fiery fragments scattered across a section of the mountainside.

over half an hour elapsed between the initial incident and the plane’s crash, and while pandemonium took hold of the ship, there was no actual breach of the craft’s body, no fire or lack of pressure or oxygen.  for the most part, terrified passengers were fully aware of what was going on around them.  there was plenty of time to reflect as they slipped from the sky.  rescue crews found letters to family and friends, wills, snatches of poetry, and other writings scattered among the rubble, most of it written with a grim certainty of death soon to follow.  505 passengers and all 15 crew members died in the accident.

all four survivors were women. one, a young off-duty flight attended, was trapped between some seats; a woman and her eight year-old daughter were saved by a section of the fuselage that did not break on impact; and a twelve year-old girl was found stuck in a tree.  the us air force, which had an outpost at nearby yokota air base, offered to help and would have been first to the scene, but was ordered back by the japanese government and replaced with japan’s own air force, the japan self-defense forces.  their helicopter did a quick sweep, didn’t instantly see any survivors, and found the mountain difficult to land on in the rainy night, so they decided to wait until morning to mount a serious effort.  the off-duty flight attendant who survived recounts hearing screaming and moaning throughout the night as other survivors, children among them, slowly died from exposure, shock, and their wounds.

the crash was caused by a faulty repair from a bad landing that happened in 1978, seven years earlier.  in reaction to this discovery, several boeing and jal employees committed suicide out of abject shame; the deceased included both the boeing engineer who had approved the faulty repair, and lower-ranking maintenance workers who had nothing to do with the incident but were so embarrassed by the carelessness that had been displayed by their fellows.  other engineers who worked on the repair were cautioned not to travel, as boeing feared they might be taken into custody by the police and charged with murder.  there was some pressure for the united states to extradite individuals responsible and try them for the american casualties from the crash, but the us declined.  enough damage had been done in the course of this terrible tragedy.

i learned about this incident in this way: this week’s episode of mad men incorporated american airlines flight 1, the 1962 crash of a boeing 707 into jamaica bay shortly after takeoff from jfk (then idlewild) airport.  as don draper sits down with a mohawk airlines exec at a japanese-themed bar, the song ‘sukiyaki’ plays wistfully in the background.  you know ‘sukiyaki’. a taste of honey remade it on their third album, twice as sweet. slick rick sings a snatch of their version in ‘la di da di’ (as does snoop dogg on his cover), and you can probably sing the refrain, ‘you took your love away from me.’  kyu sakamoto sang the 1961 original, which by 1963 topped the billboard charts and could very well have been playing in the japanese-themed bar where don draper deals with the stunning effects of a 1962 plane crash; the same kyu sakamoto who was one of 505 passengers who died in 1985 when japan airlines flight 123 went down in gunma prefecture.

and that, friends, is good sound design.  chilling.

(edited: read more about jal 123 in time magazine.  in an interesting aside, that same model of plane is used by nasa as a space shuttle carrier aircraft, which literally has the space shuttle strapped to its top side at landing sites in order to fly it back to kennedy space center.)