Word: aloha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...milk run, a routine bit of island hopping. The Aloha Airlines jet was cruising at 24,000 ft., just 25 miles southeast of the Hawaiian island of Maui, en route from Hilo to Honolulu. Everything seemed normal aboard Flight 243 last Thursday afternoon when suddenly -- with a whoosh like a paper bag popping -- a gaping hole blew open in the fuselage directly above the first- class compartment. "Everything was flying around -- books, papers, money," said Stanford Samson, a passenger seated nearby. "A stewardess was in the aisle being pulled toward the hole. Everybody who could grabbed her and held onto...
...theory, a Boeing 737 with roughly one-third of its roof blown off should not be able to fly. As Aloha 243 abruptly lost altitude, passengers began singing hymns and bracing for a crash. "I was quite sure we weren't going to make it," said Becklin, a University of Hawaii astronomer, who told of ducking his head to avoid the debris streaming from the remnants of the fuselage. "The plane was disintegrating so pieces were falling off it, molding was coming down, and the wind was catching it. The hole up front got bigger and bigger, and I knew...
...bruises and cuts from the debris and the rippling winds. But there was one fatality: Flight Attendant Clarabelle Lansing, who had flown with the airline for 37 years. Lansing, one of two attendants near the first-class compartment when the roof blew open, was apparently sucked out of the Aloha jet by the escaping...
...737s were built in the late 1960s, endured tens of thousands of pressurization cycles, and operated in the highly corrosive atmosphere of the warm salt air over the Pacific Ocean. "The only difference this time is that . the fuselage floor held," Miller said. "But the fuselage skin on the Aloha flight started its peel-back almost exactly where it did on the Far Eastern ship -- just aft of the cockpit bulkhead...
Pressurizing an aircraft for high-altitude flight and then depressurizing it for a landing is analogous to inflating and deflating a balloon. Eventually, the fuselage of the plane, like the surface of the balloon, is apt to give way. The Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 was what aviation professionals call a "high-time" aircraft -- one nearing the end of its operational life -- and had undergone far more pressurization cycles than Far Eastern...