Nippon Cargo Airlines Flight KZ103
Boeing 747SR-146B SF · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (PANC) to Narita International Airport (NRT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC05IA016
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747SR-146B SF
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- JA8158
- Operator
- Nippon Cargo Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (PANC), Anchorage, AKTo Narita International Airport (NRT), Tokyo-Narita
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 129: Foreign
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Fuselage, pressure bulkhead › Fatigue
- Fuselage, pressure bulkhead › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 14 CFR Part 129 non-scheduled international cargo flight had a rapid decompression at 30,000 feet msl, and returned to the takeoff airport. An examination revealed an elliptical tear in the right side of the pressure bulkhead web separating the electronics service bay from the nose wheel well. The tear extended about 12-inches along a horizontal rivet line, with both ends of the torn skin turned downward approximately 80-90 degrees. The damaged area (STA 260-280, WL 160-170) was excised from the structure, and an examination of the fracture mechanism was conducted. The fracture examination disclosed that the web fracture was initiated by fatigue from multiple origins on the outboard web surface within the pressure vessel. Ten separate fatigue cracks propagated through the full web thickness before the onset of rapid ductile tearing. Each fatigue crack formed adjacent to a fastener hole common with the WL 170 beam, and was in line with the edge of the bonded strip doublers on the inboard surface (wheel well side). The web material met all the engineering specifications. At the time of the incident, the airplane had logged 58,185 flight hours, and 27,243 cycles/landings. Inspection criteria for the affected area is contained in a manufacturer's Service Bulletin and their Alert Revisions 1 thru 4. Following the examination of the incident airplane, Alert Revision 4 was amended to specify more frequent inspections of the affected area.
Probable cause
The fatigue and subsequent fracture of a portion of the airplane's pressure bulkhead, which resulted in a rapid decompression during cruise flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC05IA016
- Event ID
- 20041213X01972
- Case number
- ANC05IA016
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b93db3f07559618eb94a543dbc7daf69fe0b0099bf97e25b120fc5d9b48ac232; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:11:11.212Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for JA8158; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.