Terrified passengers were left exposed after the plane’s roof ripped off
Aloha Airlines Flight 243 started like any normal flight.
The Boeing 737-2000 was travelling from Hilo, a balmy beach town on Big Island, to Hawaii’s capital Honolulu, on April 29,1988.
For 19 years, the plane had flown without any incidents and was given the all-clear to take off after routine safety checks.
The plane had already flown three times that day
But the inspectors had missed something. There was a small crack in the main body of the aircraft.
It caught the eye of one passenger, Gayle Yamamoto, as she boarded the plane.
She thought about telling the flight attendants, but she didn’t want to make a fuss.
Setting off at 1.25pm with 89 passengers and six crew members on board, the plane climbed 24,000ft over the Pacific Ocean.
Everything was going as planned. The flight attendants were serving drinks and snacks to passengers and getting ready to take their lunch breaks.
Then, without warning, a five metre hole ripped through the roof.
Disaster strikes
Pilot captain Robert Schornstheimer recalled the moment in an interview in 2018.
‘It happened almost instantaneously’ Schornstheimer told The Maui News. ‘There was no warning’.
58-year-old flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing was standing right under the rupture.
The rip happened so quickly that nobody saw her as she was sucked out of the plane. Her body was never found.
Another flight attendant, Michelle Honda, was flung onto the floor by the blast.
There were chaotic scenes inside the aircraft
She crawled along the floor, gripping on to the sides of seats as she shouted at passengers to put on their oxygen masks.
High winds sped through the plane and shards of metal and fibre glass flew through the air.
A strip of fuselage had blown into one man’s face. He cried out for help.
‘I was trying to pull it away,’ Honda said. ‘But I realized the staples had stapled into the side of his face and his face was being pulled by the staples. I told him I couldn’t help him.’
Then Honda saw that fellow flight attendant Jane Sato-Tomito was lying on the floor bleeding.
Passengers spent 13 minutes in terror before a miracle landing
‘The first time I saw her I thought she was dead,’ Honda said.
‘She was just on the borderline of the hole. Her head was split open in the back. She was under debris.’
One passenger was hit by a chunk of metal and lay in a pool of blood in her seat. Her husband tried to hold her down.
‘I was scared to death the wind was going to rip her away. I grabbed her two arms and told her I loved her. I was afraid we were going to crash,’ he said.
A miracle landing
In the cockpit, Schornstheimer was trying to stay calm.
‘It was actually almost like being in a dream at that point because it’s so unexpected your mind tries to protect you from what’s going. You’re just sort of dazed,’ Shornstheimer said.
Captain Schornstheimer steered the plane to safety
‘I did turn right back around and put my oxygen mask on as I was trained to. I signalled to my co-pilot I was taking control of the airplane.’
The plane rolled from side to side, making it difficult to control. Both engines had been damaged and the first engine failed.
His First Officer, Captain Madeline Lynn Tompkins, handled all communications.
‘We are unpressurised. Declaring an emergency,’ she told the Kahului Airport tower.
Dale Bringleson, owner of Island Aeromotive, was watching from the ground.
‘Because the upper structure was gone, there was a possibility of the plane buckling,’ he said.
‘If [Schornstheimer] hadn’t been real careful, it could have busted in two.’
Investigators found decompression on Flight 243 had been caused by metal fatigue
‘I can’t believe it even stayed together,’ said Larry Miller, the 29-year-old assistant station manager for Aloha Airlines at the time.
‘The only thing holding that aircraft together were the floor beams. Everything else was gone. It should not have been able to land.’
Keeping his cool, Schornstheimer steered the plane into a steady descent.
He had to be careful: if he went too fast, the plane could buckle and split in half, but if he went too slow, the situation could worse.
13 minutes later, he’d done it.
The plane made an emergency landing at Kahului Airport on Maui.
But the trial wasn’t over yet. Many of the passengers needed to be rushed to hospital, but there were only two ambulances at the airport.
Instead, a local tour company turned up to the airport with their minibuses.
65 passengers were injured. Six people were severely injured, including and 84-year-old woman who had serious head wounds.
The aftermath
Investigators found that the decompression had been caused by metal fatigue.
In 1972 – three years after Flight 243 was built – Boeing stopped the ‘cold bond’ process in their plane manufacturing after discovering that it was susceptible to corrosion.
However, it didn’t adjust its maintenance practices for older planes like Flight 243 that used the cold bonding.
After the incident, Aloha Airlines scrapped Flight 243 and two other planes, and the US Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections on older Boeings.
Tompkins, the co-pilot, later created a critical incident response programme with the Air Line Pilots Association to help pilots deal with trauma.
In 1995, a garden in Terminal 1 of Honolulu International Airport was opened in the memory of Lansing.