The Rot Within: The crash of British European Airways flight 706

The fiery crash of the four-engine Vickers Vanguard in a field outside the Belgian town of Aarsele killed 63 people and left investigators with a monstrous mechanical puzzle. Something had ripped apart the Vanguard’s tail section in flight, leaving debris scattered for miles downwind of the crash site, where the impact of the inverted aircraft had left behind only mangled wreckage and a smoldering crater. Only after painstaking analysis did investigators come to understand that the disintegration of the horizontal stabilizer and the subsequent loss of control were actually the result of a structural failure that occurred farther forward, where the pressurized passenger cabin met the unpressurized tail section. It was there that glaring gaps in the Vanguard’s inspection regime had allowed corrosion to take hold in the rear pressure bulkhead, resulting in a failure scenario that would be mirrored 14 years later in the much more famous crash of Japan Airlines flight 123. That dramatic follow-up has left the crash of BEA flight 706 as little more than a footnote — a lack of interest that this article seeks to address by giving this fascinating but forgotten disaster the attention that it deserves. <a href="https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-rot-within-the-crash-of-british-european-airways-flight-706-8fa237c79e66">Learn More</a>