Disasters Never a Year So Bad

Again, passengers boarded a jetliner, strapped themselves in and prepared to set course for a holiday resort. Once again, the seat configuration had been modified to hold more passengers. Almost every seat was taken. Beyond a few slender details, the tragedies of British Airtours Flight KT 328 and Japan Air Lines Flight 123 have little in common. But last week's air disaster at Manchester International Airport, in the north of England, coming just ten days after the crash of the JAL jumbo jet, had a numbingly familiar ring: the reports of panicked passengers screaming for help, a plane with a sound safety record lying twisted and charred. The grim toll of the dead, this time, was 54. Miraculously, 83 survived the blaze that engulfed the Boeing 737 shortly after an engine exploded during takeoff, forcing the plane back onto the runway.

The tragedy was the fourth major air disaster in the past ten weeks, and the third involving a Boeing aircraft. No pattern has emerged, however, that suggests any linkage between the various accidents. Preliminary reports on the Manchester wreck cited an "uncontained engine failure," meaning an explosion in the plane's engine, which was built for Boeing by Pratt & Whitney of East Hartford, Conn. In the case of Air India Flight 182, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the Irish coast on June 23, killing all 329 aboard, a bomb is suspected of having caused the 747 to disintegrate in midair. The JAL crash on Aug. 12, which claimed 520 lives, is still under investigation, but speculation continues that the rear pressure bulkhead cracked in flight.

While the precise cause of each of these disasters may never be conclusively established, there is one certainty: 1985 is already the worst year in civil- aviation history, and there are still four months to go. The year has seen 15 air accidents worldwide and a death toll estimated at more than 1,500, surpassing the previous record, set in all of 1974, by at least 245 deaths. The bleak performance has ruffled even the most intrepid flyers, and now is raising disturbing issues about flight overcrowding and inattention to safety that could give airlines a bumpy ride in the months ahead. "The 'driver' is economics, not safety," Charles Miller, a former safety inspector for the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board, charged last week.

The tragedy of Flight KT 328 began shortly after 7:00 a.m. London time. As the 131 passengers settled back in their seats, many were probably thinking of their pending escape from England's blustery summer for the sunny Greek island of Corfu, the plane's destination. At 7:07, the twin-engine jet pulled away from the loading gate and taxied to the northeast end of runway 2406.

In the cockpit, Captain Peter Terrington, 39, a 19-year veteran of flying, received the all-clear signal from the control tower. As the plane hit 120 m.p.h., about one-third of the way down the 10,000-ft. runway, the left engine exploded. The blast ruptured fuel tanks and lines, spewing jet fuel throughout the rear passenger section of the plane and turning it into an inferno.