00:00In April 1988, a Boeing 737 lost 18 feet of its roof at 24,000 feet in the air.
00:07Not a small crack. Not a warning.
00:09The top of the cabin simply tore away mid-flight.
00:1289 passengers were suddenly sitting in open sky at 500 miles per hour.
00:17Flight attendant Claribel Lansing was standing in the aisle.
00:20She was gone in an instant, pulled into the air above the Pacific Ocean.
00:24Her body was never found.
00:25The two pilots had almost no instruments left.
00:28No procedure existed for what they were facing.
00:31They had never trained for this.
00:33Nobody had.
00:34They landed the plane anyway.
00:36When investigators pulled the maintenance records,
00:38they found something that turned survival into an outrage.
00:41The damage had been building for years.
00:44Inspectors had seen the cracks.
00:46The aircraft had been cleared to fly every single time.
00:49Flight 243 had logged 89,000 flights.
00:53The metal was exhausted.
00:55The paperwork said it was fine.
00:5689 people survived something that should have been physically impossible.
01:00One person didn't.
01:01And the records showed it never had to happen at all.
