![]() The burst tore away the jet’s auxiliary power unit and a major portion of its vertical stabilizer fin, including the rudder. Once it opened up, air rushed into the rear of the 747 with so much force that it ripped off the aircraft’s tail cone at the back of the fuselage, where an airplane’s sensitive avionics are housed. The aft bulkhead, an amalgamation of aluminum sheeting, rivets, stiffening rods, and fortifying strips of metal called tear straps, separates the pressurized passenger cabin from the unpressurized tail of the aircraft. After reaching cruising altitude at 24,000 feet, the bulkhead at the rear of the 747 ruptured with a loud boom. ![]() What should have been a routine 54-minute flight turned catastrophic in only 12 minutes. without a hitch from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport-but never made it to Osaka. At the time, it was the world’s largest and most impressive passenger aircraft and had a virtually spotless safety record. That evening, he boarded Japan Airlines 123, a Boeing 747. It would be the last time she ever saw her partner. “He desperately wanted to cancel going,” says Bayly-Yukawa, who at the time was nine months pregnant with their second child. (The annual holiday, which takes place in August, is a time for people to return to their ancestral lands to honor their forefathers.) When Yukawa came home for lunch, he was furious that the head office still insisted that he travel to Osaka. But the train was full, as millions of Japanese citizens were on the move that week preparing to celebrate Obon. Yukawa even went so far as to ask his assistant to book a seat on the bullet train for him. “He spent the whole morning saying he was in a really unusual mood, and it was unusual for him because he was flying all the time,” Bayly-Yukawa recalls. That Monday morning, however, was different. Nearly every other week, he flew on Japan Airlines from Tokyo to Osaka for business. Now he was back in Japan, newly in charge of building up the bank’s aircraft leasing finance arm. The pair had met in London eight years before, when Yukawa’s work took him to England to act as branch manager of the Sumitomo Bank. ![]() ![]() It was the morning of August 12, 1985, a Monday, and Akihisa Yukawa was scheduled to be in Osaka for one night. What Susanne Bayly-Yukawa remembers, maybe the most, is how much her partner did not want to get on that plane. ![]()
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