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Aloha Airlines Flight 243

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 was a scheduled Aloha Airlines Boeing 737-297 flight between Hilo and Honolulu in Hawaii. On April 28, 1988, the aircraft suffered extensive damage after an explosive decompression in flight, but was able to land safely at Kahului Airport on Maui. Flight attendant C.B. Lansing was the sole fatality as she was blown out of the airplane, whereas another 65 passengers and crew were injured. The safe landing of the aircraft with such a major loss of integrity was unprecedented and remains unsurpassed.

Details

On April 28, 1988, the aircraft, Queen Liliuokalani (registration number N73711) took off from Hilo International Airport at 13:25 HST bound for Honolulu. There were 90 passengers and five crew members on board. No unusual occurrences were reported during the take-off and climb.

Around 13:48, as the aircraft reached its normal flight altitude of 24,000 feet (7,300 m) about 23 nautical miles (43 km) south-southeast of Kahului, a small section on the left side of the roof ruptured. The resulting explosive decompression tore off a large section of the roof, consisting of the entire top half of the aircraft skin extending from just behind the cockpit to the fore-wing area.

Part of the design of the 737 was for stress to be alleviated by controlled area breakaway zones. The intent was to provide controlled depressurization that would maintain the integrity of the fuselage structure. The age of the plane and the condition of the fuselage (that had corroded away and stressed the rivets beyond their designed capacity) appear to have conspired to render the design a part of the problem; when that first controlled area broke away, according to the small rupture theory, the rapid sequence of events resulted in the failure sequence. This has been referred to as a "zipper effect."

First Officer Madeline "Mimi" Tompkins' head was jerked back during the decompression, and she saw cabin insulation flying around the cockpit. Captain Robert Schornsteimer looked back and saw blue sky where the first class cabin's roof had been. Tompkins immediately contacted Kahului Airport on Maui to declare an emergency.

At the time of the decompression, the chief flight attendant, Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing, was standing at seat row 5 collecting drink cups from passengers. According to passengers' accounts, Lansing was ejected through a hole in the side of the airplane.

Flight attendant Michelle Honda, who was standing near rows #15 and #16, was thrown violently to the floor during the decompression. Despite her injuries, she was able to crawl up and down the aisle to assist and calm the terrified passengers. Flight attendant Jane Sato-Tomita, who was at the front of the plane, was seriously injured by flying debris, and was thrown to the floor. Passengers held onto her during the descent into Maui.

The explosive decompression severed the electrical wiring from the nosegear to the indicator light on the cockpit instrument panel. As a result, the light did not illuminate when the nosegear was lowered, and the pilots had no way of knowing if it had fully lowered.

Before landing, passengers were instructed to don their lifejackets, in case the aircraft did not make it to Kahului.

The crew performed an emergency landing on Kahului Airport's runway 2 at 13:58. Upon landing, the crew deployed the aircraft's emergency evacuation slides, and evacuated passengers from the aircraft quickly. In the photo provided, First Officer Mimi Tompkins assisted passengers down the evacuation slide. In all, 65 people were reported injured, eight seriously. At the time, Maui had no plan for a disaster of this type. The injured were taken to the hospital by the tour vans from Akamai Tours (now defunct) by office personnel and mechanics driving them since the island only had a couple of ambulances. Air traffic control radioed Akamai and requested as many of their 15 passenger vans as they could spare to go to the airport (less than a mile away) to transport the injured. Two of the Akamai drivers were former medics and established a triage on the runway. The aircraft was a write-off. What could have been a major disaster ended with a single death.

Aftermath

After the accident, a full-scale investigation was launched by the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It concluded that the accident was caused by metal fatigue exacerbated by crevice corrosion (the plane operated in a salt water environment). The root cause of the problem was failure of an epoxy adhesive used to bond the aluminum sheets of the fuselage together when the B737 was manufactured. Where it failed to bond the two surfaces together properly, water was able to enter the gap and start the corrosion process. Because the corrosion products have a larger volume than the underlying metal, the two sheets were forced apart, putting extra stress on the rivets that were also used to hold them together. The age of the aircraft became a key issue (it was 19 years old at the time of the accident and had sustained a remarkable number of takeoff-landing cycles — 89,090, second most cycles for a plane in the world at the time -- well beyond the 75,000 trips it was designed to sustain). Aircraft now receive additional maintenance checks as they age. However, several other aircraft operating under similar environments did not present the same phenomenon. A deep and thorough inspection of Aloha Airlines by NTSB revealed that the most extensive and longer "D Check" was performed in several early morning installments, instead of a full uninterrupted maintenance procedure. They also found that eddy-current testing inspections on the fuselage skin, as prescribed by Boeing, had not been performed.

According to the official NTSB report of the investigation, Gayle Yamamoto, a passenger, noticed a crack in the fuselage upon boarding the aircraft prior to the ill-fated flight but did not notify anyone. The crack was located aft of the front port side passenger door. This crack was probably due to metal fatigue related to the 89,090 compression and decompression cycles experienced in the short hop flights by Aloha.

In addition, the United States Congress passed the Aviation Safety Research Act of 1988 in the wake of the disaster. This provided for stricter research into probable causes of future airplane disasters.

Both pilots remained with Aloha Airlines. Robert Schornsteimer retired from Aloha Airlines in August, 2005. At that time, Madeline Tompkins was still a captain of the airline's Boeing 737-700 aircraft.

Alternate explanation

Pressure vessel engineer Matt Austin has proposed an alternate theory to explain the disintegration of the fuselage of Flight 243. This explanation postulates that initially the fuselage failed as intended and opened a 10" square vent. As the cabin air escaped at over 700mph, flight attendant C.B. Lansing became wedged in the vent instead of being immediately thrown clear of the aircraft. The blockage would have immediately created a pressure spike in the escaping air, a fluid hammer, which tore the jet apart. The NTSB recognizes this theory, but the board does not share the conclusion and maintain their original finding that the fuselage failed at multiple points at once. Former NTSB investigator Brian Richardson, who led the NTSB study of Flight 243, believes the fluid hammer explanation deserves further study.

Relics of the plane

Due to the plane's state, the airframe was scrapped by a Maui metal recycler after transport through Kahului. A belt buckle made from the scrapped plane now resides, along with a photo of the plane in the scrapyard, at the Paper Airplane Museum in the Maui Mall.

Dramatizations and memorials

The TV movie Miracle Landing is based on the incident.
The plot of the novel Airframe references the incident.
The Discovery Channel/National Geographic Channel series Mayday (called Air Crash Investigations in the United Kingdom and other areas, Air Emergency in the United States), a series about aircraft crashes and incidents, featured this particular flight in the episode "Hanging by a Thread." The episode contained historical footage, recreations of what happened, and interviews with investigators and survivors.
The History Channel series Secrets of the Black Box also showed historical footage, recreations of what happened, and interviews with investigators and survivors (December 22 2007).
The Discovery Channel show Mythbusters referenced the flight in its discussion of depressurization in airplanes