Peculiar airliner crashes

Salon.com's Ask The Pilot column has some very interesting findings by Patrick Smith. For example, read about the two airliners that crashed within a two-day period.

"Indeed it seems probable that the near-simultaneous crashes of those two Russian airliners in late August was the work of suicide bombers. But I have to ask: excluding acts of terror, have there ever been two major accidents on the same day?

Not that I know of. Give me a two-day window, however, and I have a story. It's not my usual practice to sensationalize crashes, particularly those whose only claim to notoriety is a burst of coincidence, but what happened in Tokyo in 1966 is so enthrallingly peculiar that I can't resist...

On March 5 of that year, a Canadian Pacific (CP Air) DC-8 crashed on landing at Tokyo's Haneda airport. Arriving in heavy fog, the plane went low, struck a sea wall and burst into flames. Sixty-four of the 72 people on the jet were killed.

The next afternoon, a BOAC (precursor to British Airways) 707 carrying 124 people took off from the very same airport, bound for Hong Kong as part of a round-the-world service originating in London. Apparently to give passengers a nice view, the 707's captain, Bernard Dobsen, chose to make an unusual visual climb-out away from the published departure path and toward the summit of Mt. Fuji -- directly into an area of extreme turbulence and 70-knot winds. Approaching the peak, the plane hit a severe gust -- a so-called mountain wave -- and broke apart in midair, throwing wreckage over a 10-mile swath.

One of the most gruesomely ironic things I've ever seen is a newspaper photograph of the crashed CP Air DC-8. Behind the wreckage, the BOAC 707 is clearly visible, taxiing for takeoff on its own doomed flight."