Word: sagami
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...standing next to the big guns of the 5,200-ton Japanese destroyer Kurama, watching sea-to-sea missiles roar off the decks of a pair of passing cruisers. The nautical fireworks were part of an SDF exercise last October involving nearly 50 warships and 8,000 sailors in Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo. The maneuvers, held just a few weeks after North Korea tested a nuclear bomb, provided a forceful reminder that, despite the unassuming name, Japan possesses an advanced military-and knows...
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...
Pilots gave high praise to Captain Takahama for keeping his stricken 747 in the air for at least 32 minutes after the tail damage was sustained over Sagami Bay. "In spite of such terrible conditions, the plane was kept aloft by engine thrust only," said Mitsuo Nakano, JAL's deputy chief of 747 pilots. "That is an incredible performance." A U.S. expert, Captain Homer Mouden of the Flight Safety Foundation in Arlington, Va., agreed. "The crew exhibited great courage and skill in trying to keep it sea flying," he said. But the odds loose," a United Air Lines pilot said...
...length of 232 ft. Boeing has delivered 618 of the planes to 68 airlines since production began in 1966. Only 15 of the jumbos have been lost, and none of the previous accidents were attributed to structural or mechanical defects. Still, the sundered tail sections that dropped into Sagami Bay last week suggested that some kind of structural weakness may finally have caught up with one particularly hardworking model...