Family members of victims in the world’s deadliest single-aircraft accident hiked Tuesday to the mountainous site in Japan where the plane went down, as the country marked 40 years since the tragedy that killed 520 people.
On August 12, 1985, the doomed Boeing 747 was around 40 minutes into an hour-long flight from Tokyo to Osaka, when it crashed into a mountain about 120 kilometres (75 miles) northwest of the capital.
Tuesday saw hundreds of people — including bereaved families and friends — hike the trails up to the cenotaph erected on Osutaka Mountain Ridge in the Gunma region where the jet crashed.
Among them was a woman who lost her younger brother in the accident.
“I want to tell him that all of his family members are alive, with his soul on our shoulders”, she told broadcaster Fuji TV.
“We’re doing our best to live our lives”.
They gathered for a solemn ceremony at the foot of the mountain in the evening to offer white chrysanthemums to the deceased and to light candles at a memorial.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that this unprecedented tragedy does not fade away and that its lessons are passed on to the future,” Gunma governor Ichita Yamamoto said in his address.
Japan Airlines Flight 123 lost control soon after take-off, with a loud noise heard about 10 minutes into the trip and an emergency declared, before shaking violently and crashing.
The plane was almost full, with many holidaymakers flying back to their hometowns during Japan’s “obon” mid-summer festival.
In the end, 505 passengers — including a dozen infants — and 15 crew members perished. Just four passengers survived.
Imperfect repairs to the aircraft’s rear bulkhead by Boeing engineers seven years earlier — coupled with JAL’s subsequent lack of oversight — were blamed for the accident.
Numerous, tiny cracks on the bulkhead — unnoticed on prior flights — burst, destroying a tail fin, rupturing hydraulic systems and sending the plane hurtling downward.
The world’s worst airline disaster was the 1977 runway collision of two 747s on Tenerife in the Canary Islands that left 583 dead.
More recently in Japan, a near-catastrophic collision occurred at Haneda airport between a Japan Airlines aircraft and a smaller coast guard plane in January 2024.
All 379 people on board the JAL Airbus escaped just before the aircraft was engulfed in flames, but five of the six people on the smaller aircraft died.
tmo-hih/mtp
