Blast Rips Open Hawaii Jet; 60 Hurt, 1 Missing

An explosion tore open an Aloha Airlines jetliner over the ocean southeast of the island of Maui on Thursday, injuring 60 people, authorities said. One person was reported missing.

The Boeing 737, one engine aflame and its cabin exposed, made an emergency landing at Kahului Airport. The airline said the plane, Flight 243, was bound from Hilo to Honolulu with 90 passengers and five crew members.

“It was like somebody had peeled off a layer of skin. You could just see all the passengers sitting there,” said George Harvey, area coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration.

One person was unaccounted for and could have been sucked out of the plane, Harvey said. “When decompression hits, that’s exactly what happens to everything that is not secured,” he said.

Two in Critical Condition

Sixty people were taken to Maui Memorial Hospital for treatment; two were listed in critical condition and four were listed as seriously injured, said Dr. Charles Mitchell, emergency room director. He said most of the injuries involved “blunt trauma, impact blast-type injuries--very few burns.”

Another doctor at the hospital, Tom Abram, said he treated one passenger who said he was “working with a computer on his lap at one moment and the next moment the computer was gone, as was a good deal of the cabin.”

Another passenger, Alice Godwin of Boulder City, Nev., said she had put on a life jacket and placed her head between her knees. “I sang all the hymns I knew,” she said. “That kept me busy.”

Fred Slusser, an eyewitness at the airport, said he could see passengers inside the plane through the gaping hole in the fuselage as it landed.

“I saw the airplane coming in without the top of the airplane on it,” Slusser said in a telephone interview with The Times.

“The canopy from the seam where the cockpit is in front of the aircraft all the way back to the leading edge of the wings was just completely gone. There wasn’t anything left. You could see the people inside, it was just mind blowing.

“But believe me those crash crews knew what they were doing. There were already about 4 or 5 ambulances there when it landed, and they got the injured off in a real hurry and very efficiently.”

Assistant Police Chief James Lawrence said it appeared to him as if only the bottom of the fuselage was holding the plane together. “From behind the pilot’s place for about one-third of the plane, the top is gone and the sides are gone,” he said.

Pilot’s ‘Fantastic Job’

Lawrence said that from what police officers and the people on the plane said, the pilot did “a fantastic job” in landing the plane in spite of the extensive damage.

Another eyewitness described the fuselage as being “peeled back like a banana.”

Craig Nichols of Pocatello, Ida., said that after the plane came to a stop, he saw “some really mangled people (passengers),” including one with an arm almost severed.

Alan Lee, assistant hospital administrator, said passengers reported hearing an explosion in the forward part of the plane.

Kevin Morimatsu, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said it had not been determined what caused the explosion, which occurred above the channel between the islands of Hawaii and Maui.

FBI agents from Honolulu were sent to investigate whether the explosion was caused by a bomb, said FBI spokesman Robert Heafner.

Luana Richardson, a spokeswoman for Aloha Airlines, said the pilot reported an emergency 25 miles southeast of Maui. Maui is about 110 miles from Hilo.

Weaving on Landing

Mark Eberly, a ramp supervisor at the airport, said the plane was weaving as it headed in for a landing. “You could tell his plane was on one engine,” said Eberly.

“I have to give the pilot credit. He brought it in good,” said Eberly, who said he and a friend dropped to their knees in shock.

A Coast Guard cutter, an airplane and two helicopters searched the water southeast of Maui for “anything related to the aircraft exploding,” said Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Jeffrey Crawley.

Eberly said he heard the pilot radio that there had been an explosion in the air, and the aircraft was coming in with major damage.

Boeing Co. Analysis

Officials at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, the primary subsidiary of Boeing Co., said there were no fuel lines or other potential sources for an explosion in the part of the plane where the blast was reported.

“The fuel is in the wing, the engines are in the wing and the fuel lines are all right there,” Boeing spokesman Tom Cole said in Seattle.

“To have it just explode in the air is just unheard of,” Cole said. “I think this is a very unusual circumstance that is not related to any other accidents we have had.”