Philippine Airlines Flight 434
{{Crash infobox|name=Philippine Airlines Flight 434|Date=
11 December 1994 |Type=In-flight bomb explosion|Site=
Minami Daito Island|Fatalities=1 |Injuries=10 |Aircraft Type=
Boeing 747-283B |Operator=
Philippine Airlines |Tail Number=EI-BWF|Passengers=273 |Crew=20 |Survivors = 292 |
Philippine Airlines Flight 434 (PAL434, PR434) was the route designator of a flight that flew on a
Ninoy Aquino International Airport near
Manila, Philippines -
Mactan-Cebu International Airport,
Cebu - New Tokyo International Airport (Now
Narita International Airport),
Narita, Japan near
Tokyo route. On
December 11,
1994, Flight 434 was on its second leg from Cebu to Tokyo when a bomb exploded, killing one passenger.
Authorities later discovered that a passenger on the aircraft's preceding leg was
Ramzi Yousef, who
United States authorities have branded a master
Al-Qaeda bomber and
terrorist. He was later convicted of the first
World Trade Center bombing. Yousef boarded the flight under an assumed name.
Yousef assembled a bomb in the
lavatory and stuck it under Seat 26K on the right-hand side of the fuselage, setting the timer to explode the device four hours later. He and 25 other passengers left the plane at Cebu.
Two hours before arrival at Tokyo, the bomb exploded at 11:43 P.M. while Flight 434 was 31,000 feet above
Minami Daito Island, which is located nearby
Okinawa and is 260 miles (420 km) southwest of
Tokyo. The explosion tore out a two square foot (0.2 m²) portion of the cabin floor and ripped the body of 24-year old
Haruki Ikegami, a
Japanese businessman occupying the seat, in half. He was an industrial sewing machine maker returning from a trip to Cebu. Flight attendants placed a blanket where he was seated. Ikegami did not survive. The bomb blew a hole into the floor revealing the cargo hold underneath. The fuselage of the plane stayed intact.
EI-BWF, the
Boeing 747-283B made an emergency landing in
Naha Airport,
Okinawa, one hour after the bomb exploded. When the control columns stopped functioning normally, the crew turned to steering via throttle control, reminiscent of
United Airlines Flight 232. None of the aircraft's other 272 passengers or 20 crew members died, although 10 passengers sitting in front of Ikegami were injured.
The seat where the bomb exploded (seat 26k) would normally be above the
centre wing fuel tank on a
Boeing 747 but on this particular model of 747 the tank was located slightly further back. Seat 26k was just one row in front of the tank.
US prosecutors said the device was a "Mark II" "micro
bomb" constructed using
Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of
Operation Bojinka of which this was a test. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January of 1995. The
bomb was designed to slip through
airport security checks undetected. The
explosive used was
liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of
contact lens fluid. The wires he used were hidden in the heel of his shoe. At that time,
metal detectors used in
airports did not go down far enough to detect anything there.
After the bombing, a man claiming to represent a rebel group said in a telephone call to the
Manila office of the
Associated Press, "We are
Abu Sayyaf Group. We explode one
plane from
Cebu."
Ramzi Yousef was testing the bomb for use in the proposed
Operation Bojinka terrorist attack. The bomb used on Flight 434 had one-tenth the power of the bombs he planned to use in the first phase of his project which was to bomb 11 aircraft over the
Pacific Ocean.
Manila police uncovered his plan on the night of
January 6 and the early morning of
January 7,
1995, and Yousef was arrested a month later in
Pakistan.
Today flight 434 no longer originates in
Manila, but instead it is a Cebu-Tokyo flight and uses
Airbus A330 aircraft rather than
Boeing 747s.
Philippine Airlines still operates a Manila-Tokyo route as flight 432.
*
List of terrorist incidents*
List of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners* http://www.mindanews.com/2003/01/2nd/vws06torres.html
* http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/twa800/bomb.htm
*
Philippine Air Lines Flight 434 at the
Aviation Safety Network Database
