Tail Fin of Downed JAL Jet Is Found : Discovery at Sea May Tell Why 747 Veered Off Course

A slab of the tail fin of a downed Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 jet was discovered late Tuesday in a bay south of Tokyo, nearly 100 miles from the crash site along a route that the plane followed before veering off course.

A Maritime Self-Defense Force ship on routine maneuvers discovered the top front portion of the tail fin--bearing part of JAL’s distinctive red crane logo--in Sagami Bay, nine miles southwest of the tip of the Miura Peninsula.

The discoveries could provide an answer as to why the plane out of control and crashed far off course, airline officials said.

Today, searchers also found the plane’s flight recorders in the wreckage, and a second plane fragment was found less than a mile from where the fin was recovered. It is a six-foot-long fiberglass pipe with a motor-like element attached. The part was marked “Aircraft 747.”

Two women and two girls who miraculously survived the crash that killed 520 people Monday in a mountainous forest, about 70 miles northwest of Tokyo, were reported seriously injured but out of danger in hospitals today. Earlier press reports of three additional survivors have proved unfounded.

No other survivors among the 509 passengers and 15 crew members had been found by this morning, as about 4,500 Air and Ground Self-Defense Force troops, police officers and firefighters resumed their search at 5 o’clock. More than 100 bodies have been recovered.

The crash of JAL Flight 123, which was en route Monday night from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to the western city of Osaka, was the worst single-plane accident in aviation history.

Lost Control

The first fragment, found about one-third of the way from Haneda Airport to the point where the pilot radioed that he had lost control of his plane, was identified as part the fin, or vertical stabilizer, a stationary part of the tail in front of the rudder. Other pieces of the tail have been spotted at the crash site.

Airline spokesman Masaru Watanabe said the tail fin, with the rudder, provides essential directional control. “Without it, you can’t control the plane--all you can do is accelerate and decelerate,” Watanabe said.

The fin piece that was found measures nearly 15 feet in length, 5 feet at the base, 3 feet at the top, and is roughly 27 inches thick. When it was brought ashore late in the evening at Yokohama, 10 workmen were needed to carry it.

A JAL spokesman said that an intact vertical stabilizer is about 24 feet high, 11 feet wide and 27 inches thick.

No airline official would speculate about why or how the huge chunk of the tail fin could have broken off in flight. In radio communications with air-traffic controllers, the pilot, Capt. Masami Takahama, had said the plane’s right rear door was broken and that seemed to be “the cause of the trouble.” He did not indicate that anything was wrong with the vertical stabilizer.

Boeing Co. spokesman Dick Schleh also declined to comment on what might have caused the crash. “We don’t want to speculate that it was the tail section or any other part of the aircraft,” he said.

Schleh also said the company Tuesday sent a team of experts to Tokyo to help with the investigation.

Eiichiro Sekigawa, an aviation expert interviewed on television today, said he knew of no previous incident of only part of a tail fin falling off or being torn off in flight.

Sekigawa said the location of the fragment indicated that it probably came off five to six minutes after takeoff. About seven to eight minutes after that, the pilot sent his first emergency signal.

1978 Incident

Meanwhile, aviation experts disclosed that the aircraft involved in the company’s sixth fatal crash in 32 years had, in a previous accident at Osaka airport on June 2, 1978, scraped the bottom rear of its fuselage while landing.

Film of the 1978 accident, which was telecast again Tuesday, showed that the landing tore small holes in the fuselage beneath the tail. Japanese aviation experts interviewed on television said that that accident, which put the plane out of operation for two weeks, could have created stress in the tail fin, though the fin itself was not damaged then.

The right rear door is located immediately above the section of the aircraft that scraped the runway on landing in 1978.

Schleh, the Boeing spokesman, said the company sent a team to repair the damage at that time, and “the aircraft was brought up to airworthiness standards.” He said details of those repairs are not available.

Takahama, 49, who had more than 12,000 hours of flying time, first radioed Tokyo air controllers shortly after passing the point where the tail-fin segment was found Tuesday that he could not control the aircraft. Then, 18 minutes later, he radioed that the right rear door was “broken.” He did not describe the condition of the door, or specify whether the door was still attached to the aircraft.

As the plane made a 90-degree turn northwest, far off its proper southwesterly course to Osaka, the pilot five times radioed that he could not control his plane. Just before it disappeared from radar screens, Takahama said he had lost track of his position.

All Seated Near Door

All four of the survivors discovered Tuesday morning, 16 hours after the plane crashed, had been seated near the problem door, in the rear of the craft.

Two of them--Hiroko Yoshizaki, 34, and her daughter, Mikiko, 8--were seated in the 54th row of the 60-row plane, which was especially designed by Boeing for use on short flights in Japan. Another survivor, Yumi Ochiai, 26, an off-duty JAL assistant purser, had been sitting in Row 56. Keiko Kawakami, a 12-year-old girl, was in the very back of the plane in Row 60.

The 530-seat 747-SR (for short range) jumbo jet is configured by JAL to contain only economy-class seats. The rear seats were set aside as a smoking section.

Police said that when rescuers reached Mikiko, she murmured her name. Later, she was in a state of shock on her arrival at the hospital. However, in mid-evening, she recovered sufficiently to tell her doctors, “I’d like to drink some milk.”

Yoshizaki and her three children had been flying to Osaka to spend a summer holiday with the children’s grandmother. There was no word of the fate of her two other children aboard the flight, or about the parents and 7-year-old sister of Keiko Kawakami, with whom she was traveling.

Two of the survivors were found in the twisted fuselage of the jumbo jet and two in other parts of the wreckage, which was scattered over an area three miles miles wide in rugged forests in the Japanese Alps. Both rescuers and doctors described their survival as a miracle.

Evacuated by Helicopter

All four were hoisted by rope from the crash site and flown by military helicopter to a hospital in the city of Fujioka, 25 miles west of the crash scene. Although doctors said that the survivors were suffering from broken bones and fractures, they were declared “out of danger” hours later.

Keiko Kawakami, a junior high school student who was described as in the best condition of the four, was transferred Tuesday night from the small local hospital to a state-run hospital in Takasaki.

There was no word about the six American passengers who the airline said were on board. They were identified as three members of a Korean-American family--Christopher Kim, Okja Kim and Scott Kim--plus Ward Wallach, 26, of Rossmoor, a graduate student at International Christian University in Tokyo employed as an English teacher by JAL; Edward A. Anderson Sr., 52, of Englewood, Colo., and Michael Hanson, 40, of Aurora, Colo.

Hanson and Anderson, both employees of Stearns Catalytic World Corp., a Denver-based engineering company, were originally thought to be the only Americans aboard the plane. Both lived in the Denver area and were traveling in Japan on business.

Wallach, an honors graduate of California State University at Long Beach, was a fluent Japanese speaker who had lived two years in Japan. His mother, Merle Wallach, said he had won a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Education as an undergraduate and was en route Monday to a seminar in Osaka. His father is Paul Wallach, restaurant critic and author.

The Kims were said to have lived in California for several years but to have returned to Seoul, South Korea, before the crash.

Awaiting Dreaded Word

A makeshift morgue was set up in a gymnasium in Fujioka. More than 1,500 relatives of the passengers were taken by buses to three small towns in the area to await word of relatives and were spending the night in the gymnasiums of five elementary schools.

Rescue teams began construction Tuesday of a temporary heliport at the crash site, about 5,000 feet up a mountain in a rugged area with no access roads or paths. About 120 police officers remained at the crash site overnight.

Representatives of the radical group Kakumaru-ha (the Revolutionary Marxist Faction) issued a statement Tuesday denying that their group, which has opposed construction of Tokyo’s international airport at Narita since it was begun in the late 1960s, had sabotaged the plane.

JAL officials had announced that an unknown caller posing as a representative of the group had claimed the radicals were responsible for the crash.

Times staff writers Ralph Vartabedian, Karen Gallegos and Bart Everett also contributed to this story.

Sitting in the rear of commercial airliners could save your life. Page 14.