Captain Katagiri had been grounded. From November 1980 until November 1981, Japan Air Lines had signed him off as unfit to fly due to what was described as a 'psychosomatic disorder.' He returned to the cockpit just two months before the crash. What the airline's medical staff had not diagnosed -- or had failed to act on adequately -- was paranoid schizophrenia, a condition that made Katagiri a danger in the cockpit. The Japanese government's investigation would later conclude that the incident was caused by a failure of proper medical examinations -- a system that allowed a mentally unfit pilot to return to active flying. Katagiri had logged years of service before his grounding, and the DC-8 he flew that morning, registration JA8061, had 36,955 airframe hours and fifteen years of reliable operation behind it. Everything about Flight 350 looked routine until the moment it was not.

The struggle in the cockpit was brief and violent. When Katagiri shoved the control column forward, Ishikawa and Ozaki immediately recognized what was happening and fought to overpower their captain. They grabbed at his arms, tried to pull back the controls, and worked to regain command of the aircraft. Their intervention reduced the severity of the impact, but at 164 feet and 130 knots there was almost no room to recover. The McDonnell Douglas DC-8-61 -- a four-engine jet powered by Pratt and Whitney JT3D-3B engines, manufactured in 1967 -- struck the shallow waters of Tokyo Bay just 510 meters from the threshold of Runway 33R. The impact tore the cockpit section away from the rest of the fuselage, and the separated nose traveled several more meters before coming to rest. Of the 174 people aboard, 24 died. The first officer and flight engineer who had fought to save the aircraft both survived.

After the crash, rescue boats arrived to pull survivors from the wreckage in Tokyo Bay. Katagiri was among the first to board a rescue boat. He told the rescuers he was an office worker, attempting to conceal his identity as the captain who had just deliberately crashed the plane. The deception did not last. Investigators quickly established what had happened in the cockpit, and Katagiri was identified as the pilot who had overridden the aircraft's controls. He was charged, but his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia led to a ruling of not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to psychiatric care and has since been released.

Flight 350 was the first crash for Japan Air Lines in the 1980s, but its significance extended far beyond one airline. The incident forced a reckoning with how airlines worldwide assessed pilot mental fitness. The Japanese government investigation pinpointed the failure as systemic: medical evaluations had not been rigorous enough to detect Katagiri's condition or to prevent his return to flying duty. The crash predated similar incidents -- EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, SilkAir Flight 185 in 1997, Germanwings Flight 9525 in 2015 -- that would force the same difficult questions about cockpit security, mental health screening, and the protocols for removing an incapacitated or dangerous pilot from the controls. For the families of the 24 who died in Tokyo Bay, and for the 150 who survived because two crew members refused to let their captain destroy the aircraft, those questions arrived on a cold February morning in 1982.