Blowout Over The Pacific

By Richard Lacayo

Everything appeared normal on United Airlines Flight 811. En route from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand, the Boeing 747, carrying 336 passengers and a crew of 18, had climbed to 22,000 ft. over the Pacific. As the flight attendants were preparing to roll out the beverage carts, passengers in the forward section heard a hissing noise. Within seconds came a loud thump of bursting metal and a roar of cold air. "It was like a dream," said passenger Gary Garber later. "A section of the plane wasn't there any longer."

In its place was an immense hole, open to the cold night sky. A 10 ft.-by-40 ft. section of the right forward fuselage had simply blown away, and nine passengers who had been seated in three rows in the business-class section were swept out to their deaths.

A howling wind cascaded through the cabin so fast that one woman's earrings were pulled from her ears. Oxygen masks popped free (some people later complained that several oxygen compartments failed to open). "It was a nightmare," said passenger Dalenya Poliszcuk. A shower of ice cubes from the beverage carts and all sorts of personal possessions filled the air. "There were shoes blown back from the front of the plane," reported passenger Andrew Gannon. "A stewardess went flying, and another one tried to calm everybody down."

New Zealand schoolteacher Beverley Nisbet, summoning a remarkable presence of mind, unleashed her camera and snapped photos of her fellow passengers as they crouched and prepared for the worst. Remembers Roger White, who was ) seated in Row 18, not far from the business-class section: "The walls seemed to be popping in on everybody. I kind of got resigned to the fact that I was going to die. I put my head down and told my wife I loved her. She told me she loved me." Said Jack Kennedy: "I thought everything was going up pretty quickly, I tell you. I had my two sons on board, one just in front of me and the other separated just a little away. He said, 'Well, it looks as though this is it, Dad.' " Added David Birrell, who was sitting about 10 ft. from the hole: "You're watching the clouds and the moon and the stars, and you're waiting for the sea."

Miraculously, the plane never hit the sea. Though both starboard engines were disabled, probably by debris, veteran pilot David Cronin, 58, skillfully reduced altitude and nudged his crippled craft along the 100-mile journey back to Honolulu International Airport. As he touched down at 2:33 a.m., one hour after the plane had taken off, everybody aboard burst into applause and then slid swiftly down the escape chutes. Said passenger Bruce Lampert: "I can tell you that was a long flight back." Afterward, a dozen people were hospitalized.

Investigators were not ready to dismiss the possibility that Flight 811 was the target of a terrorist bombing, especially when it was recalled that in January a Honolulu radio station received a call from a man threatening to plant a bomb on a U.S. plane unless a member of the Japanese Red Army was released from a U.S. jail. The immediate speculation, however, was that a cargo door had simply been whipped off in flight, taking a large portion of the fuselage with it. If that was the case, the incident was one more in a series of mishaps in which commercial aircraft have lost huge sections of their fuselage in midair. Last April a flight attendant was killed and 61 people were injured when a sizable piece of the fuselage of a Boeing 737 peeled off on an Aloha Airlines flight from Hilo, on Hawaii Island, to Honolulu, on Oahu. A subsequent inspection of all 737s ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration turned up tiny stress cracks in nearly half the planes. In December an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 was forced to land in Charleston, W. Va., after a 14-in. hole blew open in the plane's body.

The tragedy of Flight 811 was a further setback for Boeing, which in recent weeks had to acknowledge that some of its new planes were rolled out of the factory with faulty -- and potentially dangerous -- electrical wiring. In today's atmosphere of rough competition fostered by airline deregulation, a number of U.S. carriers have been accused of pushing their aging fleets to the limit and disregarding manufacturers' maintenance recommendations.

At the same time, individual planes are making more flights and longer ones. A chief measure of wear and tear in an aircraft fuselage is the "pressurization cycle" -- one takeoff, one landing -- which requires that the cabin be pressurized for high-altitude flight and then depressurized during descent. This places stress on the airframe; over time, repeated expansion and contraction weaken the plane. Like a balloon that has been inflated too many times, the plane's skin becomes vulnerable to tearing. But while the Flight 811 jet has been in service for 19 years and is one of the oldest in United's fleet, it had racked up only 15,021 cycles, considered middle-aged for a 747 but not dangerous.

This week the Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, is expected to recommend some 200 changes in federal regulations that govern maintenance. One especially significant proposal: to remove airliners from service after a specified level of wear and tear, perhaps 80,000 cycles, and rebuild the planes from the wheels up. Says A.T.A. Vice President William Jackman: "It's a first step in a series of safety measures . . . a major effort by the airlines and planemakers to assure the airworthiness of passenger aircraft." With planes falling to pieces in the sky, passengers will appreciate that.

With reporting by James Borg/Honolulu and Jerry Hannifin/Washington