Word: crashing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...difficulty breathing. The aircraft's purser now told the passengers that there was an emergency. Ochiai helped the on-duty attendants instruct the passengers on how to strap on their life preservers and assume a head-down, forward-leaning position for a possible crash landing. Then, she said, the plane went into a Dutch roll, dipping one wing, then the other. Apparently, Captain Takahama was trying to steer the aircraft by alternately increasing power to the left and the right engines. The maneuver produced a yawing and rolling motion as though Flight 123 were cutting figure-eights...
...Much of the wreckage had spilled onto a nearly 45° slope, and there was no way for even a chopper to land safely in the dark. Expecting no survivors, the searchers spent the rainy night setting up a base in the mountain village of Uenomura, 42 miles from the crash site. Area firemen and Japan's Ministry of Transport also mobilized searchers. But the narrow, serpentine roads and trails winding up from the villages in the valley ended far below the wreckage high on the mountain. Nonetheless, some rescuers set out on foot during the night...
...daybreak, before any of them had reached the site, TIME Tokyo Bureau Chief Edwin Reingold surveyed the area from a helicopter. "The crash scene was still and seemed oddly, pitifully small to represent such a major disaster," he reported. "The body of the jet had crashed through trees, uprooting them as they tore the plane apart. Stripped and blackened trees were still smoldering, and small fires could be seen amid surprisingly tiny pieces of debris. There was no sign of life. No bodies were visible. But this was deceptive. The plane had broken apart, and major parts...
What caused the disaster? The first and perhaps most significant clue was found the morning after the crash by the crew of a Japanese destroyer cruising in Sagami Bay. The sailors discovered floating on the waves a 15-ft. section of the 747's 35-ft.-high vertical tail fin. Further searching in the water turned up more than 30 other plane parts, most notably a 10-ft-long portion of the rudder assembly and a 104-lb. fiber-glass duct containing tubing and valves that had been attached to an auxiliary power unit in the tail section (see diagram...
...week went on, the experts' suspicions were also directed at the aircraft's rear bulkhead, an aluminum-alloy partition that separates the pressurized cabin from the non pressurized tail assembly. Hiroshi Fujiwara, deputy investigator for the Ministry of Transport, said that the bulkhead was found at the crash site and that it had been "peeled like a tangerine." It was possible, he said, that if the partition had cracked in flight, the air rushing from the cabin could have had enough force to dislodge the hollow tail fin. American experts theorized that the large number of takeoffs and landings, each...