Sea ferries are integral to the transport network linking the hundreds of islands which make up the Philippines. Millions of Filipinos use the ferries throughout the year; with air travel beyond the means of most it would be hard to imagine life there without them. A few days before Christmas 1987 the MV Dona Paz, …
When the Townsend Thoresen car ferry Herald of Free Enterprise left the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on the evening of March 6 1987 she was carrying some 650 passengers and their vehicles. Conditions at sea were calm so they settled down to what should have been a smooth passage across the English Channel to Dover. …
A routine domestic flight from Tokyo to Osaka ended in the world’s worst accident involving a single aircraft when a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 crashed into a ridge near Mount Osutaka in the Japanese Alps. Flight 123 took off from Tokyo’s Haneda airport shortly after 18.00 on August 12 1985 for the 50-minute scheduled flight …
One of the positive legacies bequeathed to India by the Raj (as the British rule there was known) was the network of railways which extended into every comer of the vast sub-continent. On June 6 1981 a typically crowded passenger train was travelling through the northeast Indian state of Bihar, some 400 km (250 mi) …
The Liverpool-registered merchant ship MV Derbyshire was a state-of-the-art bulk carrier when she was launched in 1976. The length of three football pitches and as wide as a six-lane motorway, the Derbyshire had been built with the capability to convey both liquid and solid cargoes. When she set sail from the west coast of Canada …
The worst airline disaster on American soil took place in May 1979 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. American Airlines Flight 191 was a three-engined McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jet bound for Los Angeles, taking off at around 15:05 with over 270 people aboard. The weather was clear and a brisk northeasterly breeze was blowing. As the …