Airplane Accidents

A United Airlines jumbo jet with 393 people aboard hit massive air turbulence over the Pacific Ocean on Sunday night, killing one passenger and injuring dozens of others aboard. Passengers and serving carts were flung to the ceiling as the plane dived almost 1,000 feet when it flew into the turbulence at 33,000 feet. Officials at Narita airport near Tokyo said the incident happened just after passengers had finished eating a meal, two hours after the Boeing 747 left the airport at 9:05 p.m.

The body of their president was finishing a long journey home Sunday, and by the tens of thousands, Poles poured into the streets of a paralyzed capital to watch it pass. It seemed as if nobody could bear to sit at home, as if they had to take some physical part in a national tragedy that happened in a place that was braided into the Polish psyche -- and yet lay distant, on the far side of a geographic border and an ideological boundary. The remains of President Lech Kaczynski were recovered from the site of the plane crash in Russia that killed 96 people Saturday, including many top Polish officials and leading figures from the nation's recent history.

Lauren Elder will never know why she survived the plane crash that killed two friends and stranded her on an icy Sierra mountaintop, wearing a lightweight skirt and vest and high-heeled boots. But she knows how she survived below-freezing temperatures when the plane crashed 30 years ago: by climbing down a 13,264-foot snow-covered mountain in spite of a broken arm, shattered teeth and a gashed and swollen leg.

Even after midnight and despite a stiff breeze chilling the capital, Poles continued to pour into the streets as a nation in mourning showed no sign of letting up on its display of grief. Elderly women clutching icons of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, young couples with tulips and children carrying crayon drawings of remembrance streamed through Warsaw's squares. They placed their offerings at makeshift shrines to the victims of a plane crash that robbed their country of much of its elite.

No one wanted to move out of the little apartment building on North Spaulding Avenue. The rents were low, the neighborhood lively. Most days, actor and masseur Johnny Ray strolled up the street with his potbellied pig, Harley. Tibor Reis, 78, tipped his fedora in greeting as he headed, in a suit, to his Orthodox synagogue. Before leaving for work to answer phones, Tami Talebi mapped out macabre movies.

The pilots of a charter jet from Los Angeles that crashed last year in Aspen, Colo., made "numerous" errors as they rushed to make an instrument landing at dusk in snowy weather, federal investigators concluded Tuesday. The National Transportation Safety Board's final report on the March 29 crash that killed 18 people also called for improved training of charter crews on the management of complex, rapidly evolving situations. Since the Sept.

A plane crashed Thursday en route to a remote gold mining region in southern Suriname, killing 19 people, officials in the South American country said. The twin-engine Antonov AN-28, operated by Surinamese carrier Blue Wing Airlines, crashed in the jungle on approach to an airstrip in Benzdorp, near the border with French Guiana, officials said.

An Iranian Boeing 707 carrying 157 passengers skidded off a runway at Tehran's airport and caught fire, killing a child and injuring several other people, state-run television reported. News reports said the landing gear of the Saha Airlines jet had failed to open.

In the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center today, collapsing both towers into flaming rubble, and crashed another aircraft at the Pentagon, shutting down the government and financial markets and spreading fear throughout America. The toll of dead or injured was expected to climb into the thousands. Hours later, a fourth airliner, bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, went down in western Pennsylvania.

From the sky came the enveloping roar, survivors said Friday. From the pine-trimmed picnic tables, they saw disaster coming. Army Reserve helicopter pilot and real estate agent Michael Brand had radioed three maydays after takeoff. He was struggling to keep his Cessna airborne. It was also carrying Michael Adler, a friend and plumbing contractor. At the park below, 17,000 people had gathered by noon on the Fourth of July.

The plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski on Saturday gutted a nation's leadership and silenced some of the most potent human symbols of its tragic and tumultuous history. It was, in a sense, a nation colliding with its past: The aircraft ran aground on a patch of earth that has symbolized the Soviet-era repressions that shaped much of the 20th century, near the remote Russian forest glade called Katyn where thousands of Polish prisoners of war were killed and dumped in unmarked graves by Soviet secret police in 1940.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who died Satuday in a plane crash in Russia, was a fervent Catholic who battled communism during the Cold War and matured into a staunchly conservative politician. Kaczynski and his identical twin, Jaroslaw, rose to the top of Polish politics in 2005 when their Law and Justice Party swept to power. With Lech as president and his brother as prime minister, the snowy-haired siblings with boyish faces led their country to the right. Despite Poland's membership in the European Union, Lech Kaczynski was adamant that Warsaw not become entangled in continental politics and bureaucracy.

Reporting from Orinda, Calif., and East Palo Alto, Calif. -- Residents of a densely packed neighborhood in East Palo Alto, Calif., awoke to explosions and fire Wednesday when a small plane carrying employees of an electric car company crashed in dense fog, killing all three aboard and spewing debris over several homes. The twin-engine Cessna 310 hit 60-foot-high transmission lines, and its fuselage was found tangled in wires. The victims, who were not immediately identified, were employees of Tesla Motors Inc., a San Carlos, Calif.

Rescue workers found no one to save. They could only retrieve the corpses of those aboard an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea early Monday during a fierce winter storm. The Boeing 737-800 bound for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, was carrying eight crew members and 82 passengers when it crashed shortly after takeoff from Beirut amid hail and thunder. The U.S.-born wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon was among the passengers. By nightfall, rescue workers had recovered about 25 bodies, the Lebanese transportation minister said.

A U.S. military drone crashed Saturday in northern Iraq, hitting a regional office of Iraq's largest Sunni political party in an area that remains an insurgent stronghold, an American military official said. The unmanned aerial vehicle crashed into the local office of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Mosul. The U.S. military identified the crashed drone as a Shadow model, which does not carry weapons and is routinely used in areas like Mosul to track insurgents planting explosives.

When the managing director of a small, trouble-prone Iranian airline won official permission in March to lease a couple of aging Russian-made airplanes, the country's small circle of aviation professionals gossiped about the strings he must have pulled to get the government's approval. And when one of the planes burst aflame on the runway in late July, killing the executive, Mehdi Dadpei, his son and 14 others, few in the industry were surprised. "Aria was famous for not adhering to safety standards for years," said an Iranian aviation industry insider, who spoke extensively to The Times on condition of anonymity.

The death toll rose to four Saturday as investigators probing the crash of a light plane into a Los Angeles apartment building shored up the unstable structure and worked to complete their search for bodies, remove the dead and extract the charred aircraft. One of the dead is believed to be a man who lived on the third floor of the Fairfax district building. The three others, including the pilot and his niece, are thought to have been in the plane.

As rescue crews on Friday discovered the bodies of three people in the wreckage of an Orange County-based tour airplane that crashed in the rain on a remote Catalina Island hilltop, questions emerged about the pilot's qualifications to handle charter flights. A search-and-rescue team found the burned bodies after a helicopter spotted the downed plane on a hilltop area near Mt. Orizaba, southwest of Catalina's Airport in the Sky, said Sgt.

Vicki Cruse knew of the perils of aerobatics, a sport requiring both the artistry of figure skating and the tenacity to endure pressures of up to nine times Earth's gravity. "You can't fix it" if something goes wrong, the seasoned Santa Paula pilot told The Times in 2002 about the sport she excelled at and loved dearly. "You just try to be as safe as you can." On Saturday, Cruse was competing for the U.S. national team at an international competition in central England when the unthinkable happened.

The copilot in February's airline crash that killed 50 people in upstate New York complained to the flight's captain that she felt ill and would have skipped the flight but didn't want to pay for a hotel room, according to a new cockpit voice recorder transcript. The extended transcript, released Monday by the National Transportation Safety Board, shows pilot Marvin Renslow commiserated with First Officer Rebecca Shaw, but didn't suggest she pull out of the flight.