TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.034

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 28

Blowout over the Pacific


Another Boeing passenger plane "peels" in midair


    Everything appeared normal on United Airlines Flight 811. En
route from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand, the Boeing 747,
carrying 336 passengers and a crew of 18, had climbed to 22,000
ft. over the Pacific. As the flight attendants were preparing
to roll out the beverage carts, passengers in the forward
section heard a hissing noise. Within seconds came a loud thump
of bursting metal and a roar of cold air. "It was like a dream,"
said passenger Gary Garber later. "A section of the plane wasn't
there any longer."

    In its place was an immense hole, open to the cold night
sky. A 10 ft.-by-40 ft. section of the right forward fuselage
had simply blown away, and nine passengers who had been seated
in three rows in the business-class section were swept out to
their deaths.

    A howling wind cascaded through the cabin so fast that one
woman's earrings were pulled from her ears. Oxygen masks popped
free (some people later complained that several oxygen
compartments failed to open). "It was a nightmare," said
passenger Dalenya Poliszcuk. A shower of ice cubes from the
beverage carts and all sorts of personal possessions filled the
air. "There were shoes blown back from the front of the plane,"
reported passenger Andrew Gannon. "A stewardess went flying,
and another one tried to calm everybody down."

    New Zealand schoolteacher Beverley Nisbet, summoning a
remarkable presence of mind, unleashed her camera and snapped
photos of her fellow passengers as they crouched and prepared
for the worst. Remembers Roger White, who was seated in Row 18,
not far from the business-class section: "The walls seemed to be
popping in on everybody. I kind of got resigned to the fact that
I was going to die. I put my head down and told my wife I loved
her. She told me she loved me." Said Jack Kennedy:  "I thought
everything was going up pretty quickly, I tell you. I had my two
sons on board, one just in front of me and the other separated
just a little away. He said, `Well, it looks as though this is
it, Dad.'" Added David Birrell, who was sitting about 10 ft.
from the hole: "You're watching the clouds and the moon and the
stars, and you're waiting for the sea."

    Miraculously, the plane never hit the sea. Though both
starboard engines were disabled, probably by debris, veteran
pilot David Cronin, 58, skillfully reduced altitude and nudged
his crippled craft along the 100-mile journey back to Honolulu
International Airport. As he touched down at 2:33 a.m., one hour
after the plane had taken off, everybody aboard burst into
applause and then slid swiftly down the escape chutes. Said
passenger Bruce Lampert: "I can tell you that was a long flight
back." Afterward, a dozen people were hospitalized.

    Investigators were not ready to dismiss the possibility that
Flight 811 was the target of a terrorist bombing, especially
when it was recalled that in January a Honolulu radio station
received a call from a man threatening to plant a bomb on a U.S.
plane unless a member of the Japanese Red Army was released from
a U.S. jail. The immediate speculation, however, was that a
cargo door had simply been whipped off in flight, taking a large
portion of the fuselage with it. If that was the case, the
incident was one more in a series of mishaps in which commercial
aircraft have lost huge sections of their fuselage in midair.
Last April a flight attendant was killed and 61 people were
injured when a sizable piece of the fuselage of a Boeing 737
peeled off on an Aloha Airlines flight from Hilo, on Hawaii
Island, to Honolulu, on Oahu. A subsequent inspection of all
737s ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration turned up
tiny stress cracks in nearly half the planes. In December an
Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 was forced to land in Charleston, W.
Va., after a 14-in. hole blew open in the plane's body.

    The tragedy of Flight 811 was a further setback for Boeing,
which in recent weeks had to acknowledge that some of its new
planes were rolled out of the factory with faulty -- and
potentially dangerous -- electrical wiring. In today's
atmosphere of rough competition fostered by airline
deregulation, a number of U.S. carriers have been accused of
pushing their aging fleets to the limit and disregarding
manufacturers' maintenance recommendations.

    At the same time, individual planes are making more flights
and longer ones. A chief measure of wear and tear in an aircraft
fuselage is the "pressurization cycle" -- one takeoff, one
landing -- which requires that the cabin be pressurized for
high-altitude flight and then depressurized during descent.
This places stress on the airframe; over time, repeated
expansion and contraction weaken the plane. Like a balloon that
has been inflated too many times, the plane's skin becomes
vulnerable to tearing. But while the Flight 811 jet has been in
service for 19 years and is one of the oldest in United's fleet,
it had racked up only 15,021 cycles, considered middle-aged for
a 747 but not dangerous.

    This week the Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade
group, is expected to recommend some 200 changes in federal
regulations that govern maintenance. One especially significant
proposal: to remove airliners from service after a specified
level of wear and tear, perhaps 80,000 cycles, and rebuild the
planes from the wheels up. Says A.T.A. Vice President William
Jackman: "It's a first step in a series of safety measures . .
. a major effort by the airlines and planemakers to assure the
airworthiness of passenger aircraft."  With planes falling to
pieces in the sky, passengers will appreciate that.