Philippine Airlines Flight 434

Ramzi Yousef boarded the aircraft for the Manila to Cebu leg of the flight. The plane departed from Manila at 5:35 a.m. After the plane was airborne, he went into the lavatory with his toiletry bag in hand and took off his shoes to get out the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel (below a level where metal detectors in use at the time could detect anything). Ramzi Yousef removed a modified Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his toiletry bag, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, when Ramzi Yousef would have long disembarked and the plane would be far out over the ocean and en route to Tokyo during the next leg of its journey, put the entire bomb back into the bag, and returned to his assigned seat.

After asking a flight attendant for permission to move to seat 26K, saying he could get a better view from that seat, Ramzi Yousef moved there and tucked the assembled bomb into the life vest pocket underneath. He exited the aircraft in Cebu.[7] Philippine domestic Flight Attendant Maria De La Cruz noticed that Ramzi Yousef had switched seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight and got off the plane in Cebu with the domestic cabin crew, but did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. 25 other passengers also got off the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew consisting of Flight Purser Isidro Mangahas, Jr., Flight Stewards Fernando Bayot, Agustin Azurin, Ronnie Macapagal, E. Reyes, R. Santiago, Flight Attendants M. Alvar, Alpha Nicolasin, Cynthia Tengonciang, Andre Palma, Socorro Mendoza, E. Co, L. Garcia, N. dela Cruz, Adora Altarejos, L. Abella and Japanese interpreter K. Okada, boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo.[4]

Aftermath of the bombing, photographed by the United States Diplomatic Security Service

Flight 434 landed in Cebu at 6:50 a.m., after a flight time of 1 hour 15 minutes. At 8:38 a.m., after a 38-minute delay, due to airport congestion, the plane took off with a total of 273 passengers on board, among them, 24-year-old Haruki Ikegami (池上春樹, Ikegami Haruki), a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker returning from a business trip to Cebu, occupying seat 26K.[4] At 11:43 a.m., 4 hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded underneath Ikegami, killing him instantly and injuring an additional ten passengers in the adjacent seats in front of and behind seat 26K.[4] The blast also blew off a two-square-foot (0.2 m²) portion of the cabin floor, which left a gaping hole leading to the cargo hold, and the cabin's rapid expansion from the explosion severed a number of control cables in the ceiling that controlled the plane's right aileron, as well as cables that connected to the steering controls of both the Captain and First Officer.[4]

The severity of the disaster was reduced by several mitigating factors. One was that this particular 747 had a modified seating arrangement instead of the standard layout, making seat 26K two rows forward of the center fuel tank; the hole in the floor beneath the seat punched through to the cargo hold instead of the fuel tank, sparing the plane from exploding.[4] The bomb's orientation, positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal, caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise, meaning that the plane's outer structure was spared, as Ikegami's body absorbed most of the blast force;[4] the lower half of his body fell into the cargo hold. Additionally, the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu meant the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, which contributed to the captain's available options for an emergency landing.[4]

Masaharu Mochizuki, a passenger on the flight, recalled that passengers, both injured and uninjured, initially tried to move away from the blast site, but cabin crew told passengers to remain in place until an assessment of the situation could be made.[4] Assistant purser and lead economy class flight attendant, Fernando Bayot, moved an injured passenger named Yukihiko Osui away from the bomb site. Bayot then saw Ikegami and tried to pull him out of the hole, but soon realized that most of Ikegami's body below the waist was either damaged or missing entirely. In order to prevent additional panic, Bayot called another flight attendant over to give the appearance that they were tending to Ikegami's needs with a blanket and oxygen mask, then reported the extent of the passenger injuries to the cockpit.[4] Of the ten passengers who were injured, one needed urgent medical care.[4]

Immediately after the explosion, the aircraft banked hard to the right, but the autopilot quickly corrected the bank.[4] After the blast, Captain Reyes asked Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador to survey the blast site to check for damage. Reyes placed the Mayday call, requesting landing at Naha Airport, Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture.[4] The Japanese air traffic controller experienced difficulty in trying to understand Reyes' request, so American air traffic controllers from a U.S. military base on Okinawa took over and processed Reyes' landing.[4] They directed a USAF Learjet towards PAL 434 to visually check for damage of the outer fuselage and to verify that the landing gear was in place. The autopilot had stopped responding to Reyes' commands and the aircraft flew past Okinawa.[4]

Reyes said in an interview for the Canadian television series Mayday that when he disengaged the autopilot he feared that the aircraft would bank right again and the crew would lose control of the aircraft; because of the pressing need to land quickly to attend to the injured and inspect the plane for additional damage, however, Reyes instructed Herrera to take hold of his own controls and then Reyes deactivated the autopilot.[4] The aircraft did not bank after the disengagement of the autopilot, but neither would it respond to steering inputs from either controller due to the control cable damage caused by the bomb.[4] The crew struggled to use the ailerons, which could allow the aircraft to roll but were still unable to change the plane's direction. After thinking through the different hypothetical methods of control, the crew settled on using asymmetric thrust to control the jet, in a very similar fashion to United Airlines Flight 232's crew five years earlier, because other methods of control were either deemed too risky to attempt, or would not have as much effect as other ways.[4]

By using the throttles to steer the plane, reducing air speed to both control the radius of turns and to allow the plane to descend, and dumping fuel to lessen the strain on the landing gear,[4] the Captain landed the damaged 747 at Naha Airport at 12:45 p.m., one hour after the bomb exploded.[5] The aircraft's other 272 passengers and 20 crew members survived.[4]