Flight 402 was the first leg of a long-haul routing from Hong Kong to Vancouver, with a scheduled fuel stop in Tokyo. The aircraft, a Douglas DC-8-43 registered CF-CPK, was barely five months old, delivered to Canadian Pacific on October 14, 1965. It was powered by four Rolls-Royce Conway turbofan engines and had accumulated just 1,792 flight hours. The crew was seasoned. First Officer Charles Mews, 58, brought nearly 20,000 hours of experience, with over 3,000 on the DC-8. Flight Engineer William Robertson, the youngest at 34, had logged nearly 8,000 hours, almost half on the same aircraft type. They had departed Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport at 4:14 P.M. Japan Time -- another famously demanding airport approach. Everything was routine until they reached Tokyo's holding pattern and the fog closed in.

After reversing the diversion decision, the crew set up for a ground-controlled approach to Haneda's runway. Controllers talked them down through the murk. The procedure was going normally until the final moments, when radar operators noticed the DC-8 was tracking below the proper glidepath. They radioed that the aircraft was too low and advised the crew to level off. The warning came too late, or the fog was too thick, or both. The DC-8 struck the approach lights first, then slammed into a concrete seawall at the edge of Tokyo Bay. The fuselage broke apart and erupted in fire. Of the 62 passengers and 10 crew members aboard, only eight passengers survived. Investigators eventually attributed the crash to pilot error, concluding that McNeal had misjudged the approach under what they called "unusually difficult weather conditions." They acknowledged that the poor visibility may have created an optical illusion that confused the veteran captain in those final critical seconds.

What happened next turned tragedy into something closer to nightmare. Less than 24 hours after Flight 402 shattered against the seawall, a Boeing 707 operating as BOAC Flight 911 taxied out from Haneda for a departure to Hong Kong -- rolling past the still-smoldering wreckage of the Canadian Pacific DC-8. The British aircraft took off, climbed away from the airport, and was torn apart by extreme clear-air turbulence in the lee of Mount Fuji. All 124 passengers and crew were killed. The combined death toll from the two Haneda-connected disasters reached 188 in under a day. And the carnage was not finished. The year 1966 would see five fatal airline accidents in Japan, a concentration of catastrophe that shook public confidence in air travel and prompted urgent reviews of weather reporting, approach procedures, and the routing of flights near Japan's volcanic terrain.

Flight 402's crash contributed to significant changes in how airlines and controllers handled low-visibility approaches at Haneda and across Japan. The investigation highlighted the dangers of reversing a diversion decision based on rapidly changing weather reports -- a scenario that continues to challenge pilots decades later. The probable cause finding of pilot error drew criticism, as it placed the burden entirely on McNeal while acknowledging the conditions were extraordinary. The approach light and seawall configuration at Haneda was reviewed and modified. For Captain McNeal and First Officer Mews, with a combined 46,000 flight hours between them, the margin of error on that foggy March night proved razor-thin. The eight survivors owed their lives to where they were sitting when the fuselage split open. Today, Haneda has been rebuilt and expanded multiple times over, its runways extending further into Tokyo Bay on engineered islands. The seawall that Flight 402 struck no longer exists in its original form. But the lessons of that night -- about the treachery of fog, the risk of changing plans under pressure, and the unforgiving geometry of a low approach over water -- remain embedded in the procedures every pilot follows when descending toward Haneda's lights.