In the last few hours, what could be the last photo taken inside Japan Airlines Flight 123, which crashed in 1985 and was one of the worst accidents in the history of commercial aviation, began to circulate online.
The image would have been taken by a passenger at the same time that the pilot of the Boeing 747,
Masami Takahama
, was trying to stabilize the plane that would eventually crash into a mountain.
In it you can see a flight attendant holding a mask and the passengers sitting and obviously worried about the embarrassing situation.
The photograph appeared on Reddit and was recovered by several international media, such as the British tabloid The Sun, which echoed the news in an article in which it also relived the fateful episode.
According to the historical photo Instagram account Retro Py, the photo was recovered from a camera found at the accident site.
The accident
The tragedy cost the lives of 520 people.
There were only 4 survivors.
Flight 123 was en route from Tokyo to Osaka, both Japanese cities, on August 12, 1985. That day, the Boeing had flown four times and showed no signs of failure.
Complications began as soon as the plane took off.
An earthquake ran through the vehicle and caused it to begin to decompress: the roof collapsed, the fuselage was damaged, the vertical stabilizer was destroyed and the hydraulic lines were cut.
The supposed last photo of Japan Airlines Flight 123 before impact.
Photo: Reddit
The oxygen masks seen in the photo fell after the air condensed into a fog seconds after the tremor.
In an effort to keep the plane stabilized, the captain used the thrust of the engine to ascend and descend, but his efforts were in vain: after half an hour of desperation,
the 747 began to spiral and crashed on a ridge near Mount Takamagahara.
(previously it had been said that it had been against the ridge of Mount Osutaka).
The official report from Japan's Aviation Accident Investigation Commission says that
the decompression was caused by a faulty repair of the Boeing
.
Plane 123 flying over Okutama.
Photo: 運輸安全委員会 (Japan Transport Safety Board), CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The plane had suffered a severe hit when landing at Itami in June 1978 and had a damaged tail.
What happened next: Could more people have survived?
Government coverage of the accident was highly controversial.
According to The Sun, twenty minutes after the impact, the United States Air Force soldier,
Michael Antonucci
, reported the accident site to the Japanese authorities, but they did not pay attention.
Instead of going to the mountain, the Japanese army assumed that all the passengers had died and refrained from going to the scene.
Furthermore, as Antonucci said years later, he ordered the soldier not to talk about the accident.
The Japanese army only sent rescue teams to the mountain the next morning, 12 hours after the warning.
They found four survivors, leading Antonucci to believe that if the government had acted quickly, it could have saved more people.
The impact site.
Photo: Σ64 (GFDL or CC POR 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Later, a doctor who participated in the rescue mission agreed with the American, saying that if the discovery had occurred 10 hours earlier they could have found more survivors.