Boeing 747 accidents
The significant 747 accidents and what each one changed — crew resource management, radio phraseology, cargo restraint and fuel tank inerting.
More than 1,500 Boeing 747s flew for over fifty years, carrying a very large share of the world’s long-haul traffic. In that time the type was involved in a number of accidents, some of which changed aviation permanently.
This section sets out what happened and what each one led to. The figures come from the accident investigations.
A note on interpreting the numbers
The 747 appears near the top of “deadliest accidents” lists, and the reason is mostly arithmetic: for decades it carried more people per aircraft than anything else flying, so when something went wrong the toll was higher.
It is also worth separating the causes. Of the worst 747 accidents, two were bombs, one was a runway collision in fog, one followed a faulty repair carried out years earlier, and one was a cargo loading failure. Very few were caused by a flaw in the aeroplane itself — and the ones that were, such as the fuel tank explosion on TWA 800 and the engine pylon failure on El Al 1862, produced design changes that were then applied across the industry.
The accidents that changed aviation
| Date | Flight | Deaths | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Mar 1977 | Tenerife — KLM 4805 and Pan Am 1736 | 583 | Standard radio phraseology; crew resource management |
| 1 Jan 1978 | Air India 855 | 213 | Instrument failure and spatial disorientation training |
| 1 Sep 1983 | Korean Air Lines 007 | 269 | GPS opened to civilian use |
| 24 Jun 1982 | British Airways 9 | 0 | Volcanic ash advisory centres |
| 12 Aug 1985 | Japan Air Lines 123 | 520 | Repair oversight; structural inspection regimes |
| 23 Jun 1985 | Air India 182 | 329 | Baggage reconciliation and hold screening |
| 21 Dec 1988 | Pan Am 103, Lockerbie | 270 | Aviation security and baggage reconciliation |
| 6 Aug 1997 | Korean Air 801, Guam | 229 | Terrain awareness; family assistance law |
| 31 Oct 2000 | Singapore Airlines 006, Taipei | 83 | Ground radar, closed-runway marking |
| 4 Oct 1992 | El Al 1862, Amsterdam | 47 | Engine pylon fuse pin inspection |
| 22 Dec 1999 | Korean Air 8509, Stansted | 4 | Instrument fault reporting; CRM |
| 17 Jul 1996 | TWA 800 | 230 | Fuel tank inerting, eventually mandated worldwide |
| 25 May 2002 | China Airlines 611 | 225 | Inspection of previously repaired structure |
| 29 Apr 2013 | National Airlines 102, Bagram | 7 | Restraint of heavy special cargo |
| 28 Jul 2011 | Asiana 991 | 2 | Lithium batteries in air cargo |
| 3 Sep 2010 | UPS 6, Dubai | 2 | Freighter cargo fire checklists |
Other notable accidents
20 November 1974 — Lufthansa 747-100, Nairobi. The aircraft was not correctly configured for takeoff, stalled shortly after becoming airborne and crashed beyond the runway. 59 of the 157 people aboard died.
3 November 1977 — El Al 747, over Belgrade. A decompression event in which one passenger died.
19 November 1980 — Korean Air Lines 747-200, Seoul. The aircraft touched down short of the runway, damaging the landing gear, and caught fire after coming to rest. 15 people died.
5 September 1986 — Pan Am 73, Karachi. Hijackers seized the aircraft on the ground; 21 people died, including purser Neerja Bhanot, who was posthumously decorated by three countries. Full account.
11 August 1982 — Pan Am 747, near Hawaii. A bomb placed under a seat killed one passenger; the aircraft landed safely.
19 February 1985 — China Airlines 006. A 747SP fell 31,500 ft in under three minutes after an engine failure and an autopilot that masked the developing upset. It was recovered and landed; 24 were injured. Full account.
1 September 1983 — Korean Air Lines 007. Shot down over Soviet airspace after an autopilot mode error took it 160 nautical miles off course. 269 died. Full account.
Operation Solomon, 1991. Not an accident, but worth recording alongside them: a single Israeli 747 carried 1,087 people out of Ethiopia in one flight, more than any aircraft before or since. Two babies were born on board.
What the 747 was designed to survive
The aircraft was certified to standards that assumed failures, and its systems architecture reflects that — four hydraulic systems driven by different engines, separated flight control paths, and per-engine electrical generation.
Two of the accidents above show where that reasoning ran out. On JAL 123 and on National 102, all the redundant systems were lost at once, because they ran through the same part of the aircraft. Redundancy protects against independent failures; it does not protect against a single event that destroys every path together.
Related
- 747 systems — how the redundancy is arranged
- The 747 family — the variants involved
- Aviation Safety Network — the standard public accident database
Frequently asked questions
- What was the worst Boeing 747 accident?
- The Tenerife airport disaster of 27 March 1977, in which two 747s collided on the runway. 583 people died, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history. The deadliest involving a single aircraft was Japan Air Lines Flight 123 in 1985, in which 520 people died.
- Is the Boeing 747 a safe aircraft?
- Yes. The 747 flew for more than fifty years and carried an enormous share of long-haul traffic, so it accumulated accidents in absolute numbers, but its rate per flight is comparable to other widebodies of its generations. Several of its worst accidents were caused by bombs, ground collisions or faulty repairs rather than by the design.