misboxie, MD, MRCGP

On April 28, 1988, a Boeing 737 approached Maui, Hawaii, with eighteen feet of its passenger cabin ripped open to the sky. The roof was gone. Much of the left cabin wall was gone. Passengers were sitting in their seats with nothing above them but the Pacific sky. And somehow, the airplane was still flying. Thirteen minutes earlier, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 had been cruising at 24,000 feet between Hilo and Honolulu with ninety-five people aboard. First Officer Madeline Tompkins was flying the aircraft while Captain Robert Schornstheimer monitored the flight. At approximately 1:46 PM, the unthinkable happened. Years of repeated pressurization cycles, corrosion, and undetected fatigue cracks had weakened the fuselage of the nineteen-year-old Boeing 737-200. The airplane had completed an astonishing 89,680 flights. As it leveled off, multiple cracks in the fuselage skin suddenly joined together. A massive section of the upper passenger cabin tore away in the rushing airflow. Flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing, standing near the fifth row, was swept out of the aircraft. She would never be found. Captain Schornstheimer turned toward the cabin and saw that the cockpit door had disappeared. Beyond it was open sky where the first-class ceiling should have been. He immediately took control of the airplane. But the damage was far worse than the missing roof. Five consecutive floor beams had broken completely. Two more were severely cracked. Sections of the passenger floor had been pushed upward by as much as four inches. The passenger oxygen system had been severed. The airplane rocked from side to side, and the flight controls felt disturbingly loose. Why did the Boeing 737 not break apart completely? The surviving lower fuselage and remaining structural connections were still holding the aircraft together. Crucially, the hydraulic flight-control system had survived the destruction. But nobody in that cockpit could know how much longer the damaged structure would hold. The roaring wind was so loud that the pilots initially communicated with hand signals. Schornstheimer deployed the speed brakes and began an emergency descent. At one point, Tompkins observed the aircraft descending at approximately 4,100 feet per minute. Below 10,000 feet, the captain began slowing the aircraft for an emergency landing at Kahului Airport on Maui. Then another problem developed. The left engine failed. Investigators would later link that failure to badly corroded engine-control cables stressed by the distorted cabin floor. Now they had only one functioning engine. When the crew lowered the landing gear, the green light confirming that the nose wheel was locked down refused to illuminate. They tried the manual extension procedure. Still no green light. Schornstheimer could not be certain the nose landing gear would support the aircraft when it touched the runway. And the damaged airplane became harder to control when he tried to slow below 170 knots. So he made his decision. He would land at 170 knots, with partial flaps, on one engine, with a severely damaged fuselage and no positive nose-gear indication. At 1:58:45 PM, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 touched down on Runway 02 at Kahului Airport. The nose gear held. Schornstheimer used the remaining engine's thrust reverser and the wheel brakes to bring the airplane to a stop. The emergency evacuation began. Of the ninety-five people who had departed Hilo, ninety-four survived. Eight suffered serious injuries. Clarabelle Lansing never returned home. The investigation revealed that inadequate maintenance inspections had allowed widespread fatigue damage to go undetected. It was a failure that changed how the aviation industry approached aging aircraft. But on that afternoon in Hawaii, two pilots had brought a catastrophically damaged airplane home. The roof was gone. The left engine was gone. And nearly the entire forward cabin had been torn open. But ninety-four people walked away. Thirteen minutes of extraordinary flying had made the difference.