The mid-air emergencies, structural failures and split-second decisions that turned routine flights into the stories crew still talk about years later. Read at your own risk. Turbulence not included.
Aircraft currently squawking 7700: emergency declared
Data from ADS-B Exchange. Not all emergencies shown.
A bomb hidden inside a radio cassette player exploded in the forward cargo hold of Pan Am Flight 103, tearing the nose from the Boeing 747 at 31,000 feet over Scotland. All 259 people aboard died, including 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas.
Read The Full Case File →Twelve minutes after Japan Airlines Flight 123 left Tokyo, a rear pressure bulkhead repaired incorrectly seven years earlier gave way. The tail tore off. All four hydraulic systems failed at once. For 32 minutes, the crew fought a 747 that no longer had a way to steer. 520 people died.
Read The Full Case File →Over three nights after Christmas 1980, US Air Force security police stationed at RAF Woodbridge, a NATO base in Suffolk, reported a craft in the forest outside their fence. The deputy base commander recorded eighteen minutes of the encounter on a pocket tape recorder, since declassified.
Read The Full Case File →Over the mid-Atlantic at night, ice crystals blocked all three of an Airbus A330's speed sensors at once. The autopilot disconnected exactly as designed, and two first officers spent the next four minutes fighting an airplane neither of them realized was stalled. It fell for three minutes and thirty seconds.
Read The Full Case File →A bomb threat diverted dozens of flights to a tiny, fog-bound airport in the Canary Islands. Hours later, two Boeing 747s ended up on the same runway at the same time, and 583 people died without either aircraft ever leaving the ground.
Read The Full Case File →A Boeing 777 carrying 239 people vanishes from radar over the South China Sea with no distress call, then flies on, alone and unresponsive, for nearly seven more hours into the Southern Indian Ocean. Most of the aircraft has never been found.
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