AVIATION ARTWORK

 A Battle of Fate: Inevitability in Plane Crashes

I sit on the edge of my seat, looking out the window at the line of planes waiting behind mine. My stomach begins to drop, and I can’t sit still. I analyze everything around me, trying to find something wrong. The engines come to life, from a soft hum to a rocket-like roar. I can feel each small bump in the runway, the plane shaking and creaking as it accelerates. There is nothing I can do anymore. My life, and the lives of everyone in this airplane, are solely in the hands of other people. Let’s hope they’ve done their jobs correctly. 

I am obsessed with airplane crashes, and I have been from a young age. Unfortunately, my obsession has not given me comfort whenever I fly. During takeoff, I think about what my last words would be, or what I would do in case I needed to evacuate the aircraft. I put myself in the place of people who had no idea their plane was going to crash. I think about every plane crash I know and why they happened. But with such chaos and panic in my mind, I say nothing. In fact, each time my plane taxis to the runway, the passengers around me are also always silent. They are preparing for something enormous, even though they will do nothing but sit for multiple hours. But many of them have no idea of what could go wrong; all it takes is a small mistake to bring an airplane down. From the perspective of many Americans who regularly fly well known, safe airlines, many think it could never happen to us. But each time we fly, we have a chance to repeat history. Aviation is one of the most precautionary transportation industries in the world, and for good reason. If a plane goes down and hundreds of people die, there better be a reason for it, and it must never happen again. But it does. 

I’ve become desensitized to the classic plane crashes; 9/11, the Tenerife Airport disaster, and American Airlines Flight 191 have given me plenty of intriguing information to dwell on. But after so many past incidents in aviation history, the FAA and NTSB should have the ability to control everything, thus eliminating plane crashes entirely. Despite there being zero fatalities or hull losses to jet-powered aircraft in 2023 (Careen), should passengers continue to worry about being involved in a plane crash?

On the morning of Thursday, January 30, 2025, I awoke to news of a plane crash in Washington, D.C. Plane crashes are extremely tragic when people are killed, but a small part of me got excited: there was finally something new to figure out. Although its investigation is still ongoing at the time of this writing, the mid-air collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter was the United States’ deadliest commercial aviation incident since 2001. The very next day, on January 31, a MedEvac Learjet 55 crashed into a busy Philadelphia intersection, killing seven people. After pursuing this interest for so many years, there has never been a time in my life during which commercial aviation safety has been under such scrutiny. With two major plane crashes in the span of just two days, the question must be asked: is modern aviation safety in a decline, or are plane crashes just another illustration of inherent human error? Perhaps the general population’s heightened fear of flying can help me resolve my own plight.

When I was around six years old, my blooming interest in airplane crashes led me to a photo of an airplane on the internet. At first, nothing struck me as unusual about the photo, until I realized that the massive 747 in the photo was missing its tail. Even at six years old, I had watched enough of Smithsonian’s “Air Disasters” to know that it was nearly impossible for a plane to fly without a tail; if the photo was actually real, how was the plane not falling out of the sky? After more than a decade of passive research, my fascination with Japan Airlines Flight 123 has been unwavering, and has helped show me why I need to know everything about plane crashes.

On August 12, 1985, Yumi Ochiai sat waiting in the terminal of Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Ochiai, a flight attendant herself, was finally able to relax, as she was off-duty and just a passenger for the short flight to Osaka. At 6:12 pm, Flight 123 departed for Osaka, and for 12 minutes, the plane flew steadily without a hitch.  But in forty-four minutes, Yumi Ochiai would be lying helpless on the side of a mountain, surrounded by the bodies of 520 people.

Seven years prior, the same aircraft that would operate as Flight 123 suffered a tail strike incident upon landing. A tail strike is when a plane’s aft fuselage section touches the ground during takeoff or landing. This can create varying damage to the aircraft, and in this instance, the damage was substantial. Maintenance workers performed the repair with parts sent by Boeing, and the 747 returned to service. Unfortunately, their repair was done incorrectly. 

The tailstrike had damaged the outer skin of the aircraft, right where the aft pressure bulkhead sat internally. With each pressurization-depressurization cycle, the plane’s internal structure stretched, forming a growing crack in the bulkhead. Maintenance workers had added a single row of rivets to the damaged bulkhead when they were supposed to add two, and the result was catastrophic; an explosive decompression ripped the bulkhead and parts of its tail off the aircraft entirely during the flight. The explosion severed all but one of the plane’s hydraulic control lines (Takeda 11), rendering it nearly impossible to control. The 509 passengers and 15 crew were now stuck in a crippled metal tube. 

Captain Masami Takahama and his crew could do little to force the plane into stable flight, communicating four separate times over 32 minutes that the plane was uncontrollable (Takeda 7). Since the 747’s four engines did not use hydraulic lines to operate, Takahama eventually discovered that they could be used to gain some control of the plane; by setting the left side engines to maximum power, the plane would bank right, and vice versa. This technique would be used again in 1989 when a similar incident damaged a United Airlines DC-10 in flight. Although this effort miraculously saved the lives of 184 on board the United Airlines flight, Takahama’s limited knowledge of this primitive technique would not be enough to save his plane.

Because of this required mastery of controlling a multi-ton vehicle, I have always envisioned my future self as a pilot. The glory of becoming a popular and experienced captain, the thrill of travelling around the world at speeds of 800 miles per hour, and the great salary have always been my “concrete” motivational factors. But my biggest motivator is internal. Physical mastery of the complex airplane cockpit comes with extremely thorough mental experience of what every switch and button controls. With so many things that could go wrong, flexibility and reaction time are the most important skills for any pilot to have; anyone could read handbooks and master the functional components of an aircraft, but few, including myself, turn so rigorously to the details of every plane crash ever. My fascination with airplane crashes has taught me what could go wrong so I could hopefully handle these situations the right way. To most, it is simply a job that puts food on the table, but to me, airplane crashes seeped into my developing brain, and have changed my thought process entirely.

Why would a kid care so much about plane crashes? Most boys that age go through some sort of vehicle phase, and while being interested in airplanes wasn’t out of the ordinary, an interest in plane crashes was certainly gruesome and unorthodox. Around age four, I began collecting everything airplane-related I could: scale models, LEGO sets, identification guides, and memorabilia. The easily-fragmentable LEGO pieces became the perfect medium for me to simulate my own plane crashes, and I even dressed up as a bloodied pilot for Halloween in second grade. For some reason, I was intrigued by everything related to a plane slamming into the ground. My desire to know everything I could about a crash led me to documentaries and accident reports, and survivor interviews gave me the sense of humanity I had naively overlooked. There were people on every plane that crashed, real people that lost their lives and suffered greatly. But I needed to know exactly what went wrong with the plane, what caused it to fall out of the sky. I needed to know what the pilots could have done, if anything. This is why the Japan Airlines crash intrigued me so greatly; how could so many fatalities be attributed to a single, easily preventable mistake? How could a plane so large just disintegrate? 

Nevertheless, the Japanese crew would fly the airplane for 32 minutes with no control, a feat heavily admired in the aviation community: “Suppressing Dutch roll mode by use of the differential thrust between the right and left engines is estimated practically impossible for a pilot” (Takeda 78). Takahama and his crew were thrust into a situation they had no control over, and didn’t have the knowledge to fix it. They didn’t even know that the plane was missing its tail and was bound to crash from the minute it took off (Takeda 126). 

The plane pitched up and down, rolling between mountains and rapidly gaining and losing altitude. At 6:56, the plane collided with a ridge and became inverted, slamming into a mountain slope and exploding. Upon impact, the aircraft experienced forces of over 100 G’s, but miraculously, of the 524 people on board, four survived, including flight attendant Yumi Ochiai (Takeda 122). The survivors, all women, were seated in the very rear of the airplane, and the plane’s high-density seating configuration meant that all seats surrounding the survivors were occupied by those who either did not survive the impact or died awaiting rescue. The survivors boarded the plane not knowing that everyone around them would die, and that they had simply chosen the right seat out of luck. They had no control over whether they survived or not. 

Japan Airlines Flight 123 was also unique in that its pilots did everything correctly to try and land the aircraft; other crews unfortunately do not get this honor: “There are many accidents initiated by some sort of mechanical failure or other problem that could have been prevented by a proper response by the flight crew” (Oster 2). Investigators concluded that Captain Takahama and his crew could not have saved the aircraft. Five different crews tried to replicate the incident in a simulator, a stress free environment. Even without the hypoxia that the pilots of Flight 123 would have suffered from the disorienting effects of exposure to high altitude, not a single one of the simulator crews was able to successfully land the aircraft (Takeda 83). 520 people boarded an airplane not knowing they would die in under an hour, and three pilots boarded not knowing that they would be unable to save their plane, no matter how hard they tried.

This feeling of helplessness is common in all pilots who were victims of a crash, not just commercial airline pilots with hundreds of people to protect. I had the chance to speak to a former US military helicopter pilot, former Maj. Dwight Mears, whose helicopter crashed in Iraq. Originally, I had assumed that his helicopter was shot down during combat, but Mears told a different, more disturbing story. "We had several people killed in my unit and several of us injured, but a lot of it wasn't due to the enemy. It was just because we were in a dangerous environment." This challenged my previous assumptions of aerial combat, as I had no idea how many pilots died simply because of things they couldn’t control, like obstacles in the environment. Mears was also troubled by the fact that the Army had ignored FAA recommendations for a known problem that was present on his type of helicopter, stating, “We just were flying on kind of a ticking time bomb—but it just stopped working”. While there are inherent dangers in aviation, especially in combat, corporate neglect should never be the reason an aircraft goes down and kills or injures its own pilots. However, this is not to absolve all pilots involved in a crash from error.

Although a 2010 study revealed that pilot error was the leading cause of the loss of an aircraft, with 40 percent of all incidents being caused by the crew themselves (Oster 7), there are many different factors that contribute to pilot error. For example, “during a landing situation where a Pilot is checking instruments, communicating with ATC, changing radio frequencies, communicating with a co-Pilot, and controlling a plane, it is easy to see how someone could become overwhelmed” (Hofer 2). The cockpit of an airplane is one of the most complex, unforgiving, and high-risk working environments across all professions, and even small mistakes can have tragic consequences. However, a flight crew can do everything correctly and still suffer the consequences of others’ actions: “While the pilot is in command of the aircraft, if the deck is stacked against him or her an accident becomes inevitable” (Lowery 201). This invisible burden can be placed in the pilots’ hands unknowingly, before they even enter the cockpit. In the case of the Japan Airlines crash, this “invisible burden” led all the way back to the airplane’s manufacturer, Boeing; the Japanese maintenance workers did the suggested repair with parts sent from Boeing, shifting the blame to the corporate level. Unfortunately, two of the workers, Hiroo Tominaga and Susumu Tajima, would commit suicide out of guilt to apologize for the accident. Although the Boeing 747 was a completely safe aircraft, and the authorized repair did last seven years, a chain of very small errors from each party contributed to the deaths of 522 people. 

Such devastating air disasters can expose internal problems with an aircraft, pilot training, or aviation laws, leading to regulation reforms and the intense scrutiny of airplanes and the people flying them. Thus, many safety precautions within aviation would never exist if an airplane didn’t crash. This idea yields the difference between preventable tragedies and inevitable incidents that are essential to improving aviation: pilot error. If a solution to a specific problem is dependent on an accident occurring, then it is inevitable. For example, if the Japan Airlines crash never happened, the regulations that came as a result would also have never been implemented, putting many other aircraft into vulnerable positions.

Like Japan Airlines Flight 123, there are some things that I just can’t control, no matter how hard I try. If the majority of airplane crashes are caused by the pilots themselves, then the success of perfect pilots depends on the hundreds of people who are supposed to keep them safe.  If some things are inevitable, why should I worry about them? If I truly did step on a doomed airplane, I would never even know. My worry and anxiety about being on a faulty airplane, having an unqualified crew, or simply falling out of the sky is completely unwarranted. As soon as I board the aircraft, I am helpless, and there is no changing it; if something were to go wrong, it likely already happened. I acknowledge this, disregard the crashes, and remember that the most dangerous part of flying on an airplane is the drive to the airport.

Works Cited

Hofer, Nehemiah C., and Mujahid Abdulrahim. “Evaluation of pilot task saturation characteristics via simulated cognitive overloading.” 2023 Regional Student Conferences, Jan. 2023, https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-72831. Accessed 17 Jan. 2025

“IATA Annual Safety Report Executive Summary.” IATA, www.iata.org/en/publications/safety-report/executive-summary/#:~:text=The%20commercial%20aviation%20industry%20suffered,accident%20for%20every%20880%2C293%20flights. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025. 

Lowery, John, and William B. Scott. A Pilot’s Accident Review: An in-Depth Look at High-Profile Accidents That Shaped Aviation Rules and Procedures. Aviation Supplies & Academics, Inc, 2015. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025

Magnuson , Ed, et al. “Last Minutes of JAL 123.” TIME Magazine, 26 Aug. 1985, pp. 20–27, Accessed 17 Jan. 2025. 

Mears, Dwight. Personal interview. 2 Jan. 2025

Oster, Clinton V., John S. Strong, and Kurt Zorn. "Why airplanes crash: causes of accidents worldwide." (2010). Accessed 14 Jan. 2025

Takeda, Shun, et al. “Aircraft Accident Investigation Report on Japan Air Lines JA8119, Boeing 747 SR-100.” Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission, 1987. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025