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747 Image: Kambui Pan American World Airways Pan Am Boeing 747121(A/SF) N747PA "Clipper Juan T. Trippe"
Tipped Over 747: Federal Aviation Administration


This is the story of pan am flight 845. On the 30th of july 1971 a pan am 747 was on the ground at san francisco international airport, today it would be flying all the way to tokyo's haneda airport. The crew boarded the plane at 2:30 pm and began to prepare for the flight to japan. By 3:01 pm flight 845 filled with 218 people was ready to go. As the 747 pushed back from the gate the pilots had a curve ball thrown at them. They were planning to take off from runway 28L but that runway was closed for maintenance. Their next choice was runway 01R but the first 1000 feet of 01R was also closed. The pilots had a decision to make, to get more information on everything they decided to talk to dispatch, they informed dispatch about the closures. They realized that runway 01R was long enough to accomodate a 747. Then a radio call came in “"Talked to tower, the thousand feet they were talking about that's closed is actually overrun, you couldn't start from that point in any event because of thrust damage. Start at the painted threshold and you still have 9,500 fect plus clear way ahead of you and under those circumstances the page using 3A power shows no takeoff limitation at your gross. Over." Long story short they could take off. The flight crew and the flight controller discussed everything a bit more and came to the conclusion that the pilots should use flaps 20 for takeoff instead of the 10 degrees that they had originally planned for. In the cockpit the pilots read out the v speeds for this takeoff. V1 or the speed at which you could no longer safely reject a takeoff was 149 knots and the rotate speed was 157 knots.

Soon the huge 747 was on the displaced threshold of runway 01R ready to go. At 3:28 pm the crew got their takeoff clearance and all 4 engines were advanced to takeoff power. As the plane picked up speed the first officer called V1, As the plane accelerated to the rotate speed the first officer noticed something strange. The end of the runway was fast approaching and they were still on the ground! They pulled back as hard as they could in an attempt to lift the giant 747 into the air. They were out of runway the pilots felt a bump as the runway ran out but the plane lifted off at the very last second. Usually takeoffs like these leave a very long tear on the tail you might even lose pressurisation but you're usually in a position where you can safely land the plane. But the state of flight 845 was much more dire. The flight engineer looked at his panel and he relaised that they were losing hydraulics systems 1,3 and 4. He launched himself into the emergency checklist for those systems. A meber of the cabin crew came into the cockpit and they had some bad news. A few passengers were badly injured. At the end of the runway there were these lights that were put on top of long thin rods, the plane flew through them and those rods punctured through the skin and into the cabin, Into a cabin full of passengers. The injuries sustained by the passengers were not minor bumps and scrapes either some people had life threatening injuries. The pilots needed to put this plane back on the ground as soon as possible. But its not as simple as just coming back in for a landing, for one thing the plane was fueled up for a intercontinental flight to tokyo and so they needed to dump some fuel to make sure that the plane's weight was within limits for a safe landing. More importantly they had no idea of the damage sustained by the plane. They needed to know what worked and what didnt before making a landing attempt. You dont want to be in a situation where you find out that something important doesn't work when you're on short final.