This is a replay or remake of an episode that was shown earlier on a series called "Mayday" (later, "Air Collision"). I can't remember the year or the episode number. Some of the same newsreel footage is shown.
It was a terrible accident involving a Boeing 757 suddenly flying uncontrollably shortly after taking off from an airport in Tokyo and winding up smashing into a mountain, killing most of the more than 500 people aboard. The pilot's last words on the cockpit voice recorder are, "This is the end!" The investigators from Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board rush to the site because, after all, the airplane was built in America and everyone wants to know if this was an isolated incident or a more general problem that might result in the grounding of all 747s.
The investigators are an amazing group. By examining the wreckage at the site they're able to determine that it was not a bomb but a fracture of a large umbrella-shaped structure at the rear designed to separate the pressurized passenger cabin from the unpressurized tail cone. The device simply failed and blew out, taking the vertical stabilizer and rudder with it, along with the hydraulic systems that power the flight surfaces, thus rendering the airplane uncontrollable.
Examining the maintenance record of this particular airplane they discover that the tail had scraped the runway during a landing and the damage needed to be repaired. That included replacing the bottom half of the aft pressure bulkhead.
How many take offs and landings could the airplane have endured if the replacement part had been insufficiently fixed to the rest of the barrier by, say, too few rivets? An engineer estimated 11,000 take off and landings before an explosive failure and depressurization. The records show that this 747 had been through somewhat more than 12,000 such pressure cycles. Now, that's what I would call expertise.
It develops that some of the dead might have been saved had immediate help from the US Air Force been accepted, which it was not. Nobody can determine who issued the order for the US helicopter to stand down. The Japanese take these operational failure seriously. The president of Japan Airlines resigned; the JAL maintenance manager committed suicide.
