[wyldfire]

Wow, that was a scary recording.

From the wikipedia article [1]:

> Casualties of the crash included all 15 crew members and 505 of the 509 passengers

> ...

> deadliest single-aircraft accident in history, the deadliest aviation accident in Japan, the second-deadliest Boeing 747 accident and the second-deadliest aviation accident after the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster.

> ...

> During the investigation, Boeing calculated that this incorrect installation would fail after approximately 10,000 pressurization cycles; the aircraft accomplished 12,318 successful flights from the time that the faulty repair was made to when the crash happened.

> ...

> In the aftermath of the incident, Hiroo Tominaga, a JAL maintenance manager, killed himself to atone for the incident, while Susumu Tajima, an engineer who had inspected and cleared the aircraft as flight-worthy, committed suicide due to difficulties at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123

[kbenson]

> > In the aftermath of the incident, Hiroo Tominaga, a JAL maintenance manager, killed himself to atone for the incident, while Susumu Tajima, an engineer who had inspected and cleared the aircraft as flight-worthy, committed suicide due to difficulties at work.

That sucks. If ever there were two people that knew first-hand how important it was to get right and would have worked to make sure that accident, and likely others as well could never happen on their shift, those were them. Suicide as atonement is a stupid, counter-productive cultural norm (and hopefully it's much less of a norm in any modern society where it exists).

[wallace_f]

Interestingly, at the end of WWII, when Tojo was captured by the Americans, he shot himself in the abdomen--creating referencss fo seppuku--and apologized that "I am taking so long to die."

Not long after, he was tried for war cimes and executed by hanging.

I'm sure he would have rather have died from the gunshot.

Whether right in some cases and wrong in others, I think it's difficult to say cultural norms are simply and plainly wrong.

[kbenson]

I'm not sure comparing a case where the person has a high likelihood of dying anyway is necessarily appropriate based on what I was referring to. I don't fault the skydiver that failed to pack their parachute correctly and causes it to fail for committing suicide before hitting the ground, I do fault a system that would cause the person responsible for re-checking the parachutes to commit suicide because of the death.

I also didn't say the cultural norm was wrong, just that it was stupid and counter-productive. I meant stupid as an enhancement to counter-productive, and I meant counter-productive in relation to actually advancing a society to the point where the problem that caused the suicide in the first place is less common.

[marak830]

As someone who lives and works in Japan, it's absolutely shameful how people do this, when they are pressured so much from above to bot only work insane hours, but to take the entire responsibility upon themselves. It's as if there is a magical white line, where you can pass orders down through, but there is no responsibility for errors passing back through.

[wallace_f]

I've just been reading a bit on the aftermath and what is amazing to me is that Boeing apparently paid nothing in compensation or liability, but JAL did, despite the accident being nearly entirely the fault of Boeing!? Does anyone know why?

[wyldfire]

Based on my reading, the fault lies with JAL for executing the wrong repair procedure. Why do you think the fault lies with Boeing?

Boeing specifies: "repair procedure is like so" and due to misunderstanding, pressure to bring equipment back into use, failure to acquire the correct parts or some sort of similar problem [all my speculation btw], JAL maintenance executes another repair procedure that seems equivalent to them (or at least adequate).

[wallace_f]

Boeing technicians did the repair on behalf of Boeing. JAL did not do the repair.

[thetinguy]

It was not Beoing's fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123#Caus...

[wallace_f]

And if you read your own link you would see that it was Boeing's own repairmen that caused the faulty repair. JAL didn't do the repair.