Japan Checking 747 Fleet as Probe of Crash Focuses on Shattered Fin

The first five of Japan’s 69 Boeing 747 jumbo jets to be checked today passed safety inspections ordered by the government as evidence accumulated that the tail fin of a Japan Air Lines 747 that crashed Monday disintegrated during flight.

The government Thursday ordered inspections of the tail fins, or vertical stabilizers, of all cargo and passenger Boeing 747s operated by Japan’s four airlines.

As two more fragments of the tail fin of the crashed 747 were found in Sagami Bay, 100 miles from the crash site, a photograph taken by an amateur photographer showed that a ragged mid-section of the tail fin remained on the JAL plane minutes before the plane slammed into remote, heavily forested 5,408-foot Mt. Osutaka, killing 520 persons. There were four survivors.

Transportation Ministry investigators Thursday also identified another part of the tail fin at the crash site. Previously, a 19 1/2-inch sliver attached to the top of the aircraft’s rear fuselage was all that had been found of the tall tail fin at the crash site.

The 747-SR, specially designed for high-volume short routes, lost part of its tail fin, then veered far off course and crashed. Part of the fin and other pieces of the tail section have been found at sea, along the route the aircraft followed before the pilot reported that he had lost control of the plane.

The Transportation Ministry on Thursday issued “emergency instructions” ordering Japan Air Lines, All Nippon Airways, Japan Asian Airways (a JAL subsidiary) and Nippon Cargo Airlines to conduct structural inspections of all of their Boeing-made jumbo jets within the next 300 flight hours.

For 747s with more than 15,000 flights, the ministry ordered the inspections completed within the next 100 flight hours.

“The circumstances seem to indicate that the damage to the vertical stabilizer and the rudders might be the starting point of the accident,” the ministry statement said.

Inspections on the older planes were expected to be completed by next Tuesday, while checks on newer aircraft were to be completed by the end of the month.

It was the first time such comprehensive safety inspections had been ordered here on the Boeing 747s, which have been flown by Japanese airlines since 1970.

In Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration was awaiting more information on the accident, the worst single-aircraft disaster in history, before deciding whether to order inspections of Boeing 747s operated by U.S. airlines, a spokesman said.

“If the early inspections of the Japanese aircraft show a pattern of problems that could lead to something similar, then we would want to take a look at ours,” spokesman Fred Farrar said. The FAA statement noted that no U.S. carriers fly 747-SRs.

Boeing Co. spokesman Dick Schleh said the Japanese decision to inspect 747 tail assemblies in that country is a “prudent” action. Even though Boeing regards the Japanese action as prudent, it is not planning to recommend that other airlines take similar action, Schleh said.

“We don’t yet know what happened and we find no reason to request special inspections,” Schleh said. “We have been in touch with our customers and we have indicated to them that we have seen no evidence to require special inspections.”

Boeing officials defended the 747 as “airworthy” and said they would not hesitate to fly in the planes.

The Transportation Ministry orders require the airlines to report to the ministry on the results of their inspections and warned that the ministry would ground any 747 not inspected.

Seven areas of the tail fin were singled out for special attention.

Tatsuo Doi, a section chief in JAL’s maintenance division at Narita International Airport, said the ministry had ordered the airlines to inspect all metal throughout the tail fin for cracks, corrosion or structural defects, and to check all rivets as well as the places where the tail fins are attached to the fuselage. They are also to inspect the movable rudders and the places where the rudders are attached to the rear of the tail fin.

The four airlines were also ordered to check the tail section for signs of oil leakage in the power-control equipment for the rudders, Doi said.

The special inspection, he said, will combine all of the points normally checked in periodic inspections of the tail fin.

JAL, whose fleet of 48 jumbo jets is the largest in the world, plans to conduct inspections at night after its jumbos return from daily flights to their home bases at Tokyo’s Haneda and Narita airports.

The first inspection began Thursday night on JAL’s oldest jumbo, an aircraft delivered in 1970 which has flown more than 17,000 flights and operated for 50,300 hours. It returned Thursday night from a flight to Hong Kong.

By this morning, JAL had finished inspecting that aircraft and three others, and found no problems, while All Nippon Airways had inspected and passed one of its jumbos. All of the inspections were conducted with Transportation Ministry officials watching.

Forty-three of the jumbos, 39 of which are operated by JAL, are used on international routes. Each inspection was expected to take about six hours.

A team of nine American investigators--two from the Federal Aviation Administration, two from the National Transportation Safety Board, and five from Boeing Co.--held initial consultations with Transportation Ministry officials. They also traveled to Yokohama to inspect a large slab of the ill-fated plane’s tail fin found Tuesday in Sagami Bay.

The photograph of the doomed aircraft was taken minutes before its crash by an amateur photographer in a northwestern suburb of Tokyo and was shown on a Fuji TV newscast.

A blow-up, although blurred, clearly showed that the plane was a 747 and that the stationary tail fin had been reduced to a ragged half of its normal size, with the front, the top and the rear sections torn off.

Hiroshi Fujiwara, deputy chief of the Transportation Ministry’s investigative team, told reporters after visiting the crash site that he had identified from a helicopter a large chunk of the tail fin. Judging by red paint of the JAL logo on the tail fin, Fujiwara said the fragment appeared to be from the middle of the fin. The fin’s top section was found in Sagami Bay.

The fragment, the sixth section of the tail to be found, was spotted below a ridge more than a mile from the one on which the aircraft came to a stop. A V-shaped swath was cut through trees on the first ridge, indicating that the aircraft probably scraped the tip of that ridge and then crashed into the next one, bursting into flames.