FOUR decades on, the doomed Japan Airlines Flight 123 crash remains one of the world’s worst aviation disasters of all time.
Haunting final pictures show the jet just moments before it crashed because of a critical failure – killing 520 people on board.
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Tragedy struck on August 12, 1985 when the Boeing 747SR-46 jet crashed just 62 miles northwest of Tokyo.
On board the jet were 509 passengers and 15 crew members.
Only four of them survived.
The flight, dubbed the “Titanic of Japan”, took off from Tokyo and was headed to Osaka but tragically crashed in the remote area of remote mountain area of Mount Takamagahara.
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And to date, it remains the worst disaster in the history of Japanese aviation.
One of the last few pictures shows the Jet missing its tailfin.
Another picture, thought to be the final picture taken on board, shows oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling.
It is thought that the plane was perfectly fine, and the journey began normally after all the routine checks.
But just 12 minutes after takeoff, First Officer Yutaka Sasaki and Captain Masami Takahama noticed a tremor tear through the plane.
The jet decompressed rapidly, which caused the ceiling near the rear bathrooms to collapse.
It extensively damaged the fuselage and destroyed the plane’s vertical stabiliser and all four hydraulic lines.
Moments after the tremor was detected, the air condensed into a fog, forcing the oxygen masks down.
For a terrifying 30 minutes, the pilots fought hard to claim control of the plane, but the jet was in a vicious and disorienting cycle of falling and then rising.
Passengers shouted as they were thrown around the plane by the rapid spiralling, while the pilots fought to bring the jet to safety.
But the out-of-control plane continued to descend and got closer to the mountains, where it crashed and exploded.
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According to reports, Captain Takahama made a last-ditch effort to keep the aircraft aloft by using the engine thrust to ascend and fall.
He is believed to have yelled: “This is the end!”
Around 20 minutes after impact, US Air Force serviceman Michael Antonucci reported the crash site.
In the aftermath of the crash, the search and rescue efforts were delayed, and survivors were not found until several hours later.
This delay likely contributed to the high death toll, as some victims who survived the initial impact died before help could arrive.
Japanese officials delayed sending a rescue crew, assuming that no one had survived, and told Antonucci not to discuss the disaster.
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The Japanese military only sent rescue teams in the following morning, a whole 12 hours after the crash had been reported.
Antonucci revealed a decade later: “Four people survived. Many more could have.
“At the time it occurred, I was ordered not to speak about it.”
One doctor involved in the rescue mission said: “If the discovery had come 10 hours earlier, we could have found more survivors.”
Yumi Ochiai, a survivor, claimed to have heard other survivors wailing all through the night, until the intense cold finally got to them.
Antonucci added that had it “not been for efforts to avoid embarrassing Japanese authorities”, a team of US Marines could have searched the wreckage less than two hours after the crash.
The puzzle began to come together as more teams were dispatched to retrieve body and plane parts.
Two years later, after a comprehensive investigation, Japan’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission determined that the decompression was caused by a botched repair by Boeing workers.
The same aircraft had thudded heavily upon landing at Itami Airport in June 1978, causing extensive tail damage.
The impact also cracked open the pressure bulkhead, necessitating immediate repairs.
However, Boeing’s repair personnel utilised two spice plates parallel to the break in the bulkhead instead of one, rendering the repair job worthless.
According to Ron Schleede, a member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, the crew did everything they could to avoid the disaster, which was “inevitable”.
World’s Worst Air Disasters
Tenerife Airport Disaster, 1977
On March 27, 1977, on the island of Tenerife two Boeing 747 jets collided on the runway in the deadliest accident in aviation history.
The accident occurred as a result of heady mix bombings, organisational issues and fog.
A bomb explosion at the airport on Gran Canaria caused many flights to be diverted Los Rodeos Airport on the popular holiday island.
Among two of the flights affected were KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, neither would leave the island.
Tragedy struck due to radio miscommunication causing the Dutch plane to rocket down the runway at take-off speed while the US aircraft was taxing in the opposite direction.
The resulting collision resulted in the death of 583 people.
Malaysian Airlines 370, 2014
The MH370 Boeing was seen for the last time on military radar at 2.14am, close to the south of Phuket Island in the Strait of Malacca.
Half an hour later, the airline lost contact with the plane. It had been due to land at around 6.30am.
On July 29, 2015 – more than a year after the plane’s disappearance – debris was found by volunteers cleaning a beach in St Andre, Reunion.
A week later investigators confirmed the debris did belong to MH370, but it did not help to locate the plane as it had drifted in the water.
Theories abound about what happened to the missing jet but the true cause of the crash may never be known.
Malaysian Airlines 17, 2014
Flight MH17 was as passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17 2014.
All passengers and crew perished putting the death toll at 298 in the deadliest case of “airliner shootdown” in history, 80 children was on board when it went down.
It was hit by a Russian made Buk surface to air missile fired from Ukrainian separatist held land near Donetsk.
Air France Flight 447, 2009
On June 1 2009 Air France Flight 447 disappeared off the radar off the coast of Brazil.
The airline took six hours to acknowledge the loss of the plane and no trace was found for days.
All 216 passengers and 12 crew were never seen again after the Rio to Paris flight crashed out of the sky.
Investigations went on to prove that the crash was caused by the pilot flying to high and stalling the engines causing the plane to fall out of the sky and into the Atlantic ocean.
Uruguayan Flight 571, 1972
The chartered Air Force plane carrying 45 people, including a Uruguayan rugby team, crashed in the Andes in South America.
More than a quarter of the passengers lost their lives on impact and a number of others quickly succumbed to the cold of the mountains or injuries sustained in the crash.
Of the 27 who survived the initial impact and cold a further eight were killed in an avalanche a few days after the incident.
Eventually 16 people were rescued after spending more than two months in the freezing conditions of the mountains.
But those survivors had been forced to eat the corpses of their fellow passengers when faced with starvation.
JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367, 1972
The McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 model aircraft was blown up by a bomb placed on board by Croatian fascist militant group the Ustase as it made its way back to Yugoslavia from Sweden.
All but one of the 28 passengers and crew died on the plane but one stewardess made it into the record books.
Lockerbie Bombing, 1988
Pan Am Flight 103 was flying from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York on 21 December 1988.
While over the Scottish town of Lockerbie a bomb was detonated aboard the flight, killing all passengers and crew.
Eleven of the town’s residents on the ground were also killed by falling debris, bringing the death toll to 270.
Air India Crash, 2025
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner with 242 passengers on board – including 53 Brits – smashed into a doctors’ hostel in Ahmedabad in the west of India.
The plane was headed to London Gatwick with 232 passengers and 10 crew on board when it crashed just seconds after take-off.
The Dreamliner lost contact just seconds after take-off, according to flight tracking website Flightradar.
A final alert was last logged less than a minute after it started the journey from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.
It had only reached 625ft at the time, officials believe.
Seconds before the crash, the Boeing was filmed flying low over the Meghani Nagar residential area with the pilots appearing to be in a desperate bid to keep the plane in the air.
Moments later, it was seen disappearing behind buildings before a huge blast was seen in the distance.
Brit passenger Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, was the sole survivor of the fatal crash.
