Philippine Airlines Flight 434

Philippine Airlines Flight 434

Aftermath of the bombing, photographed by the United States Diplomatic Security Service.
Occurrence summary
Date December 11, 1994
Summary Bomb detonation leading to loss of flight controls
Site Minami Daito Island
25°50′45″N 131°14′30″E / 25.84583°N 131.24167°E / 25.84583; 131.24167Coordinates: 25°50′45″N 131°14′30″E / 25.84583°N 131.24167°E / 25.84583; 131.24167
Passengers 273
Crew 20
Fatalities 1
Injuries (non-fatal) 10
Survivors 292
Aircraft type Boeing 747-283B
Operator Philippine Airlines
Registration EI-BWF
Flight origin Ninoy Aquino Int'l Airport
Stopover Mactan–Cebu Int'l Airport
Destination Narita International Airport

Philippine Airlines Flight 434 (PAL434, PR434) was a flight on December 11, 1994 from Cebu to Tokyo on a Boeing 747-283B that was seriously damaged by a bomb planted by terrorist Ramzi Yousef, killing one passenger and damaging vital control systems. The bombing was a part of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attacks. The Boeing 747 (tail number EI-BWF) was flying the second leg of a route from Ninoy Aquino International Airport (formerly Manila International Airport), Pasay City in the Philippines, to New Tokyo International Airport (now Narita International Airport), Narita, in Japan, with one stop at Mactan–Cebu International Airport, Cebu, in the Philippines. After the bomb detonated, 57-year-old veteran pilot Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes[1] was able to land the aircraft, saving the aircraft and the remaining passengers and crew.

Authorities later discovered that Ramzi Yousef, a passenger on the aircraft's prior flight leg, had placed the explosive.[2][3] Yousef boarded the flight under the fake Italian name "Armaldo Forlani",[4] an incorrect spelling of the name of the Italian legislator[5] Arnaldo Forlani. He was later convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.[3]

Bombing

Setting the bomb

EI-BWF, the aircraft involved, in December 1988

Yousef boarded the aircraft for the Manila to Cebu leg of the flight. After the plane was airborne, he went into the lavatory with his dopp kit in hand and took off his shoes to get out the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel (below a level where metal detectors in use at the time could detect anything). Yousef removed an altered Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his dopp kit, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, which was approximately the time at which the plane would be far out over the ocean en route to Tokyo, put the entire bomb back into his dopp kit, and returned to his current seat.

After asking a flight attendant for permission to move to seat 26K, saying he could get a better view from that seat, Yousef moved to that seat and tucked the assembled bomb into the life vest pocket under that seat. He exited the aircraft in Cebu.[6] Philippine domestic flight attendant Maria dela Cruz noticed that Yousef had switched seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight and got off the plane in Cebu with the rest of the domestic flight crew, but did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. 25 other passengers also got off the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo.[4]

Explosion

After a 38-minute delay the flight took off with a total of 273 passengers on board, among them 24-year-old Haruki Ikegami (池上春樹 Ikegami Haruki), a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker returning from a business trip to Cebu, occupying seat 26K.[4] Four hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded underneath Ikegami, killing him and injuring an additional ten passengers in adjacent seats in front of and behind seat 26K.[4] The blast blew a two-square-foot (0.2 m2) portion off the cabin floor, and the cabin's rapid expansion from the explosion severed several control cables in the ceiling that controlled the plane's right aileron, as well as cables that connected to both the pilot and first officer's steering controls.[4]

What kept the disaster from being worse was that this particular 747, formerly operated by Scandinavian Airlines as SE-DFZ "Knut Viking", had a different seating configuration and seat 26K was two rows forward of the center fuel tank so that the hole in the floor punched through to the cargo hold [4] instead and spared the plane from a fiery explosion.[4]

The bomb's orientation, positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal, caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise.[4] This configuration meant that Ikegami's body absorbed most of the blast force and the plane's outer structure was spared.[4] The lower half of his body fell into the cargo hold and ten passengers sitting in the seats in front of and behind Ikegami were also injured; one needed urgent medical care.[4] Additionally, the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu meant the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, which contributed to the captain's options available for an emergency landing.[4]

Masaharu Mochizuki, a passenger on the flight, recalled that passengers, both injured and uninjured, initially tried to move away from the blast site, but cabin crew told passengers to remain where they were until an assessment of the situation could be made.[4] Assistant purser and lead economy class flight attendant, Fernando Bayot, moved an injured passenger named Yukihiko Osui away from the bomb site. Bayot then saw Ikegami and tried to pull him out of the hole, but soon realized that most of Ikegami's body below the waist was either damaged or missing entirely. Ikegami died minutes later. Bayot called another flight attendant over to pretend to minister to Ikegami's needs with a blanket and oxygen mask in order to prevent additional panic, then reported the extent of the passenger injuries to the cockpit.[4]

Cabin crew members,[7] who were later commended by President Fidel Ramos for their "professional handling of a potentially disastrous situation" along with the flight deck crew, were Flight Purser Isidro Mangahas, Jr., Flight Stewards Fernando Bayot, Agustin Azurin, Ronnie Macapagal, E. Reyes, R. Santiago, Flight Attendants M. Alvar, Alpha Nicolasin, Cynthia Tengonciang, Andre Palma, Socorro Mendoza, E. Co, L. Garcia, N. dela Cruz, Adora Altarejos, L. Abella and Japanese Interpreter K. Okada.

Landing

Immediately after the explosion, the aircraft banked hard to the right, but the autopilot quickly corrected the bank.[4] After the blast, Reyes asked Comendador to survey the blast site to check for damage. Reyes placed the Mayday call, requesting landing at Naha Airport, Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture.[4] The Japanese air traffic controller experienced difficulty in trying to understand Reyes' request, so an American air traffic controller from a United States military base on Okinawa took over and processed Reyes' landing.[4] The autopilot had stopped responding to Reyes' commands and the aircraft flew past Okinawa.[4]

Reyes said in an interview for the Canadian television series Mayday that when he disengaged the autopilot he feared that the aircraft would bank right again and the crew would lose control of the aircraft; however, because of the pressing need to land quickly to attend to the injured and inspect the plane for additional damage, Reyes instructed Herrera to take hold of his own controls and then Reyes deactivated the autopilot.[4] The aircraft did not bank after the disengagement of the autopilot, but neither would it respond to steering inputs from either controller due to the control cable damage caused by the bomb.[4] The crew struggled to use the ailerons, which could allow the aircraft to roll but were still unable to change the plane's direction. Finally the flight crew, including First Officer Jaime Herrera and Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador, disengaged the auto-throttles and resorted to steering via throttle control, reminiscent of United Airlines Flight 232.[4]

By using the throttles to steer the plane, reducing air speed to both control the radius of turns and to allow the plane to descend, and dumping fuel to lessen the strain on the landing gear,[4] the captain landed the damaged Boeing 747-283B at Naha Airport at 12:45 p.m., one hour after the bomb exploded.[5] The aircraft's other 272 passengers and 20 crew members survived.[4]

The bomb

Main article: Ramzi Yousef

United States prosecutors said the device was a "Mark II" "microbomb" constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of the Bojinka plot, for which this was a test.[8] On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995. The bomb was, or at least all of its components were, designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid.[8] Other ingredients included glycerin, nitrate, sulfuric acid, and minute concentrations of nitrobenzene, silver azide, and liquid acetone. The wires he used were hidden in the heel of his shoe, below the detectable range of the metal detectors used by airports of the day.

Aftermath

Manila police were able to track the batteries used in the bomb and many of its contents from Okinawa back to Manila. Police uncovered Yousef's plan on the night of January 6 and the early morning of January 7, 1995, and Yousef was arrested a month later in Pakistan.[4]

The aircraft, at the time having the tail number EI-BWF, was later converted to a cargo configuration as Boeing 747-283B(SF). It subsequently changed hands several times, always to air cargo companies, and was finally placed in storage in 2007 at Châteauroux-Centre "Marcel Dassault" Airport.[9]

The crew moved on to separate ways following the incident. Reyes would move to Cebu Pacific and served there until his retirement in 2002. He later died in February 2007 from prostate cancer.

Flight Engineer Comendador, meanwhile, became the CEO of AirAsia Philippines in July 2016. [10]

In addition to the news broadcasts, the popular Discovery Channel and National Geographic show Mayday (also known as Air Crash Investigation and Air Emergency; on the Smithsonian Channel it is known as "Air Disasters") aired an episode about Philippine Airlines Flight 434 called "Bomb on Board". Filipino Canadian actor Von Flores portrayed Captain Reyes while Canadian actor/comedian Sam Kalilieh played Ramzi Yousef.[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ GovTrack: Senate Record: Tribute To Captain Eduardo Reyes
  2. ↑ State's Security Bureau Takes on Expanded Role, Washington Post, September 27, 2004.
  3. 1 2 CNN.com, January 8, 1998. 'Proud terrorist' gets life for Trade Center Bombing.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 "Bomb on Board," Mayday season 3, episode 6. First aired 2005.
  5. 1 2 Yousef bombs Philippines Airlines Flight 434, GlobalSecurity.Org report on incident
  6. ↑ Simon Reeve (2002). The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism. UPNE. pp. 79. ISBN 978-1-55553-509-4.
  7. ↑ [Manila Bulletin], December 18, 1994
  8. 1 2 Bonner, Raymond; Weiser, Benjamin (August 11, 2006). "Echoes of Early Design to Use Chemicals to Blow Up Airlines". The New York Times Company. Retrieved June 20, 2016.
  9. ↑ Boeing 747 – MSN 21575, airfleets.net
  10. ↑ http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/573068/money/companies/phl-airasia-names-comendador-as-interim-ceo
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