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Deadly Explosion On Philippine Airlines Flight 434
In 1994 a passenger was killed by a bomb on a Phillippine Airlines flight. This led Phillippine police to discover a plot to blow up 11 Airlines in 48 hours over the Pacific, the another plot, which they shared with the FBI 1995, to fly Airplanes into the world trade center and pentagon
Philippine Airlines Flight 434, sometimes referred to as PAL434 or PR434, was a flight on December 11, 1994 from Cebu to Tokyo on a Boeing 747-283B that was seriously damaged by a bomb, killing one passenger and damaging vital control systems.
The bombing was a test run of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attacks. The Boeing 747 (tail number EI-BWF) was flying the second leg of a route from Ninoy Aquino International Airport (formerly Manila International Airport), Pasay in the Philippines, to Narita International Airport, in Tokyo, Japan, with a stop at Mactan–Cebu International Airport, Cebu, in the Philippines. After the bomb detonated, 58-year-old veteran pilot Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes was able to land the aircraft, saving it and the remaining passengers and crew.
Authorities later discovered that Ramzi Yousef, a passenger on the aircraft's prior flight leg, had placed the explosive. Yousef boarded the flight under the fake Italian name "Armaldo Forlani", an incorrect spelling of the name of the Italian legislator[5] Arnaldo Forlani, in order not to get caught.[6] Yousef was later convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Ramzi Yousef boarded the aircraft for the Manila to Cebu leg of the flight. The plane departed from Manila at 5:35 a.m. (UTC+08:00) After the plane was airborne, he went into the lavatory with his toiletry bag in hand and took off his shoes to get out the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel below a level where metal detectors in use at the time couldn't detect. Yousef removed a modified Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his toiletry bag, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, when he would be long disembarked and the plane would be far out over the ocean and en route to Tokyo during the next leg of its journey, put the entire bomb back into the bag, and returned to his assigned seat.
After moving to seat 26K following a granted permission by a flight attendant due to his claim that he could get a better view from that seat, Yousef tucked the assembled bomb into the life vest pocket underneath. Yousef decided here as in some 747 models, the fuel tank is underneath which would cause considerable damage and most likely bring the plane down (similar to the Lockerbie bombing which occurred 6 years earlier); the 747 used for this flight had the fuel tank further back. He exited the aircraft in Cebu.
Philippine domestic Flight Attendant Maria De La Cruz noticed that Yousef had switched seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight and got off the plane in Cebu with the domestic cabin crew, but did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. 25 other passengers also got off the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew consisting of Flight Purser Isidro Mangahas, Jr., Flight Stewards Fernando Bayot, Agustin Azurin, Ronnie Macapagal, E. Reyes, R. Santiago, Flight Attendants M. Alvar, Alpha Nicolasin, Cynthia Tengonciang, Andre Palma, Socorro Mendoza, E. Co, L. Garcia, N. dela Cruz, Adora Altarejos, L. Abella and Japanese interpreter K. Okada, boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo.
Flight 434 landed in Cebu at 6:50 a.m., after a flight time of 1 hour 15 minutes. At 8:38 a.m., after a 38-minute delay due to airport congestion, the plane took off with a total of 273 passengers on board. Among them was 24-year-old Haruki Ikegami (池上春樹, Ikegami Haruki), a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker returning from a business trip to Cebu, occupying seat 26K. At 11:43 a.m. Eastern Indonesian Time, 4 hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded Ikegami’s seat injuring an additional ten passengers in the adjacent seats in front of and behind seat 26K. Steward Fernando Bayot tried to pull him out of the hole that was from the explosion, but soon Bayot realized that part of Ikegami’s body was missing, and that Ikegami had died. After that Bayot reported to the captain.
The blast also blew off a two-square-foot (0.2 m²) portion of the cabin floor leaving a gaping hole leading to the cargo hold location, and the cabin's rapid expansion from the explosion severed a number of control cables in the ceiling that controlled the plane's right aileron, as well as cables that connected to the steering controls of both the Captain and First Officer.
The severity of the disaster was reduced by several mitigating factors. One was that this particular 747 had a modified seating arrangement instead of the standard layout, making seat 26K two rows forward of the center fuel tank. The hole in the floor beneath the seat punched through to the cargo hold instead of the fuel tank, sparing the plane from exploding.
The bomb's orientation, positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal, caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise. This spared the plane's outer structure, as Ikegami's body absorbed most of the blast force;[6] the lower half of his body fell into the cargo hold. Additionally, due to the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, which contributed to the captain's available options for an emergency landing.
Masaharu Mochizuki, a passenger on the flight, recalled that passengers, both injured and uninjured, initially tried to move away from the blast site, but cabin crew told passengers to remain in place until an assessment of the situation could be made.
Assistant purser and lead economy class flight attendant, Fernando Bayot, moved an injured passenger named Yukihiko Osui away from the bomb site. Bayot then saw Ikegami and tried to pull him out of the hole, but soon realized that most of Ikegami's body below the waist was either damaged or missing entirely. In order to prevent additional panic, Bayot called another flight attendant over to give the appearance that they were tending to Ikegami's needs with a blanket and oxygen mask, then reported the extent of the passenger injuries to the cockpit. Of the ten passengers who were injured, one needed urgent medical care.
U.S. prosecutors said the device was a "Mark II" PETN "microbomb" constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of the Bojinka plot, for 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 1995. The bomb was, or at least all of its components were, designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid.
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