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Shortly afterward, Boeing sent a worldwide advisory from Seattle suggesting that all carriers using 747s "may wish" to follow the Japanese example by visually inspecting the tail fin and rudder structures on these planes. The company also suggested an inspection of the rear bulkhead. A spokesman for the U.S. Air Transport Association said that "everybody will follow those recommendations to a T." The procedure, which should take about two hours, can be done between flights and during refueling stops.
Despite the precautions, none of the experts were worried about the overall reliability of the 747, which some pilots affectionately call "Fat Albert" because of its bulging profile. Many consider it one of the safest airliners ever built. It is also the largest, with a wingspan of 196 ft. and a length of 232 ft. Boeing has delivered 618 of the planes to 68 airlines since production began in 1966. Only 15 of the jumbos have been lost, and none of the previous accidents were attributed to structural or mechanical defects. Still, the sundered tail sections that dropped into Sagami Bay last week suggested that some kind of structural weakness may finally have caught up with one particularly hardworking model of the 747.
Whatever the eventual findings, Yasumoto Takagi, 73, the president of JAL, assumed full responsibility for the tragedy and told Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone that he would resign. Nakasone made no effort to dissuade him. High officials in Japan, whether governmental or private, consider it ethically mandatory to leave office when something goes disastrously wrong, even if they were not directly responsible.
The year's series of wide-body crashes, though seemingly unrelated in their causes, nonetheless raised once again the question of how many people should be packed into a single aircraft. No matter how safe the plane or how economically efficient the ever increasing payload, any accident involving a huge plane becomes potentially catastrophic in loss of life. Boeing has orders for the 747-300, a model configured to handle 600 passengers. Asked if that seemed wise, Jerome Lederer, founder of America's Flight Safety Foundation, said that evacuation of so many people in the event of trouble would be difficult, adding, "I would want to sit next to an emergency exit."
But when the world's largest airliner smashes into a mountain, there is no escape, except for the very few--four this time--favored by the whims of fate. That was tragically clear last week as the helicopters carried body after body, wrapped in bright blankets, down from the smoldering wreckage on Mount Osutaka. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Yukinori Ishikawa/Fujioka and Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo