THE PLANE THAT LOST ITS ROOF

On the morning of April 28, 1988, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 prepared for the short hop from Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island, to Honolulu — a routine inter-island run of well under an hour, the kind of flight that was the backbone of Aloha's whole business. In command was Captain Robert Schornstheimer, 44, with roughly 8,500 flight hours, 6,700 of them on the 737. Beside him sat First Officer Mimi Tompkins, 36, herself an experienced 737 pilot with roughly 8,000 hours. In the cabin, three flight attendants prepared the aircraft for its 89 passengers: chief flight attendant Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing, Michelle Honda and Jane Sato-Tomita.

The aircraft itself, registration N73711, was a Boeing 737-297 — the 737-200 variant built for Aloha — nicknamed Queen Liliuokalani, continuing the airline's tradition of naming its planes after Hawaiian royalty. It had been in service since 1969, and while its 35,496 flight hours weren't unusual for a 19-year-old jet, its flight cycles were: 89,680 takeoffs and landings, each one a full pressurization cycle for the fuselage. Boeing had originally designed the 737-200 for a service goal of 75,000 cycles. N73711 had passed that mark by nearly 15,000 cycles — the second-highest cycle count of any 737 in the world at the time. Its sister ship in the Aloha fleet, N73712, held first place, with more than 90,000.

As chief flight attendant, Lansing was working the aisle when the fuselage tore open. Passengers who survived the flight would later describe her standing at row five, reaching across to hand a passenger a drink, in the ordinary middle of an ordinary task. In the same instant the roof disappeared, so did she — witnesses described seeing her lifted up and to the left and gone, swept into the 250-mile-an-hour slipstream at 24,000 feet before anyone could react.

There was nothing anyone could have done. She was the only person standing in the open section of the cabin at the moment it opened to the sky. Search crews combed the ocean below the flight's track in the days afterward. Nothing belonging to her was ever recovered — no wreckage, no personal effects, nothing. She remains the flight's only fatality, and her family has never had the closure of a recovery.

Of the 95 people aboard — 89 passengers and a six-person crew, by the NTSB's own count, though some retellings list 90 passengers and five crew depending on whether an off-duty air traffic controller riding the jumpseat is tallied as a passenger — 65 were injured. Eight were seriously hurt, including flight attendant Jane Sato-Tomita; 57 sustained minor injuries, mostly cuts and bruises from flying debris and the chaos of the decompression. Clarabelle Lansing was the only person killed.

Investigators credited several factors with keeping that number as low as it was: every seated passenger's belt was fastened, the aircraft's structure — battered as it was — held together long enough to land, and the crew, cabin and flight deck alike, kept functioning through a situation none of them had trained for in exactly this form. Michelle Honda and Amy Jones-Brown helped lead a fast, orderly evacuation once the aircraft stopped, getting the injured off first.