The wreckage of Flight 801 in August 1997 is shown with Guam International Airport in the background in this photo from the National Transportation Safety Board report.
Smoke billows from the wreckage of Korean Air-flight 801 taken hours after the Aug. 6, 1997, pre-dawn crash on Nimitz Hill.
Asia Pacific Airlines pilot Capt. Joe San Agustin recalls the the carnage he saw when he came upon the scene, almost 25 years ago, where Korean Air Flight 801 crashed into a hillside near Nimitz Hill, during a visit to the memorial site July 29, 2022.
The memorial monument, near Nimitz Hill, dedicated to the air crew and passengers who perished in the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801, as seen July 29, 2022.
As Korean Air Flight 801 approached Guam early on the morning of Aug. 6, 1997, flight officers discussed the island’s rainy weather, crew fatigue and whether the glideslope — part of the instrument landing system — was working properly.
The plane’s 42-year-old captain, a former pilot in the South Korean air force, was originally supposed to fly from Seoul to Dubai on Aug. 5, but he didn’t have enough rest, so he was put on the shorter Guam flight instead. Toward the end of the flight, he made several comments about crew scheduling and problems getting enough rest. At 1:21 a.m. he remarked, “eh ... really ... sleepy.”
In addition to the captain, the first officer and the flight engineer, there were 14 flight attendants and 237 passengers on board. They included three babies and three children between the ages of 2 and 12.
The wreckage of Flight 801 in August 1997 is shown with Guam International Airport in the background in this photo from the National Transportation Safety Board report.
Less than a half-hour after the captain said he was sleepy, Guam Fire Department dispatchers received an emergency call from a resident who reported seeing a fire in the hills. Then the crew of another airplane told air traffic controllers that “we got a big fireball on the hillside up here.”
On Saturday, the island will mark the 25th anniversary of Flight 801’s crash with a ceremony at the Nimitz Hill monument erected to remember the 228 who were killed. The facts surrounding the crash, as well as transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder, are detailed in the National Transportation Safety Board’s 212-page report on the tragedy.
But a quarter-century later, the memory of the crash still weighs on the people who went to the hillside that morning.
Carl T.C. Gutierrez was serving his first term as governor in 1997 when he was awoken by a phone call reporting that a passenger plane went down in the Nimitz Hill area.
“I remember jumping out of bed, throwing on the first clothing I could find, and literally bolting down the main staircase at Government House, two steps at a time,” Gutierrez said. He got in a truck with police officer Cecil Sulla, a member of the former governor’s executive security team, and the two could see smoke in the sky as they made the short drive up to Nimitz Hill.
Mangled fuel distribution pipes in the road prevented Guam Fire Department rescue vehicles from getting closer, so Gutierrez, Sulla and then-Fire Chief Chuck Sanchez went as far as they could in Sulla’s truck. Then they traveled by foot.
“I started running towards the screams and asked the firefighters as well as the GPD motorcycle officers to follow me,” Gutierrez said. “In those pre-dawn hours, the rain was heavy, and the area was almost completely dark. It sounds odd, but that terrain, which I camped at numerous times in my Boy Scout days decades earlier, had become suddenly familiar to me all over again. I was literally the first one to arrive at the crash site, with Cecil and Chief Sanchez close behind.”
Smoke billows from the wreckage of Korean Air-flight 801 taken hours after the Aug. 6, 1997, pre-dawn crash on Nimitz Hill.
In interviews with the National Transportation Safety Board, surviving passengers reported “intense flames and heat swept through the cabin.” The crash investigation report said: “One survivor, who was seated in the aft economy class section (row 34), stated that her husband was engulfed by fire in the seat next to hers. Another passenger, a professional helicopter pilot, stated he felt what he thought was a ‘hard landing’ but that the airplane then rolled and began to disintegrate. The passenger stated that he exited the burning cabin by walking through a large hole in the fuselage. He also said that a ‘ball of flame was going down the center of the airplane’ and that passengers were screaming and calling for help.”
Gutierrez later met that helicopter pilot, Barry Small of New Zealand.
“Very early on in our efforts, I came across a young girl who was scraped up pretty bad, and she was clinging to a woman who, by her uniform, I could tell was a flight attendant,” Gutierrez said. “The flight attendant was in pretty bad shape, and I gathered them both and pulled them into a depression in the ground about 20 yards from the wreckage. I remember voices of other rescuers warning that parts of the plane may blow up, and my only thought was to get this little girl and woman into a ditch or something where they might be shielded if there were another explosion. The little girl, who told us her name was Rika, clung to me and motioned toward the plane and said ‘mama’ or ‘mommy,’ imploring me with her eyes and gestures to go save her mom from the plane. I knew by the flames that there was little hope if her mom was, in fact still in the plane, but to pacify Rika, I ran toward the plane as far as I could before I knew for certain it was impossible.”
As he continued to help passengers, Gutierrez heard a man speaking English.
“I ran toward the voice in hopes of finding a passenger who could tell me what might have happened. I found a man who identified himself as Barry Small. I identified myself and assured him that help was on the way. I learned that he was from New Zealand. He was lying in the grass, and I could see his bone protruding from his leg. I got another jacket from a fireman and placed it under Barry’s head, then found some sticks and reeds to help hold his leg steady. With another fireman’s jacket, I shielded Barry’s face from the rain.”
After tending to Small, Gutierrez said he returned to help Rika and the flight attendant.
“On my way toward them, I saw that medics from Naval Hospital had arrived, and I yelled out to them and waved them over, pointing out the flight attendant whose condition was deteriorating. She was badly gashed and going in and out of consciousness.”
The child was placed on a stretcher and carried up the hillside.
“When we got to the clearing by the road, I commandeered an SUV, and we loaded Rika in it. I jumped in and rode with her to GMH. There was a Japanese doctor on duty at the ER, and he spoke to Rika, whom we learned was half Japanese. Through the interpretation of the doctor, Rika was able to tell us that she was 11 years old, that her mother was Korean and had been stuck in her airplane seat and unable to break free. She told us that her father was in Japan, and thankfully we were able to contact him. I stayed at GMH with Rika for as long as I could. As we suspected, however, Rika’s mother perished in the crash.”
When Gutierrez returned to the crash site later that morning, “body bags lined the hillside. The rain had mostly passed by then. The adrenaline surge that had kept me hyper-focused hours earlier had normalized, leaving me to finally experience the emotions from everything that had happened. And there, in the starkness of the daylight, with the carnage around me and the smoldering wreckage before me, that was the first time I remember really breaking down. But it was by no means the last.”
Asia Pacific Airlines pilot Capt. Joe San Agustin recalls the the carnage he saw when he came upon the scene, almost 25 years ago, where Korean Air Flight 801 crashed into a hillside near Nimitz Hill, during a visit to the memorial site July 29, 2022.
Bernadette Sterne covered the public safety beat for Pacific Daily News 25 years ago. Like Gutierrez, she got a phone call in the middle of the night alerting her of the crash. She drove to the top of Nimitz Hill and parked on the side of the road.
When she looked down at the plane, she saw flames everywhere.
“At that moment it was just a real dark realization for me that this was real. This was it,” she said. “A major disaster was unfolding, right on our island.”
When she finally got close to the crash site, she felt the heat from the flames, smelled fuel from the wreckage and heard screams from the injured.
“I was a cops and courts reporter, so I have seen death before, and tragedy, but nothing of this magnitude ever,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t think anything can prepare you for that.”
Sterne saw many first responders, federal and local police, firefighters and medical personnel.
In testimony to Congress in September 1997, then-Del. Robert Underwood said there were more than 500 civilian and military rescue workers at the site before 6 a.m. on the day of the crash.
“None of the first rescue personnel ever gave up hope of saving lives. As if unsatisfied with the toll on human life, the crash of Korean Air Flight 801 also claimed the life of an Air Force volunteer who suffered a heart attack while assisting at the crash site,” Underwood testified.
Sterne described the scene in the early hours.
“I remember the first responders are just rushing in without any concern for their own safety, and pulling survivors out of the wreckage, and then carrying them up this really slippery, muddy hill to like a triage area,” she said.
“They just like had this complete exhaustion, like you could see it on their faces, and they were just so distraught over the kind of the magnitude of death surrounding them.”
“There were so many heroes that night. That plane was still on fire. And a lot of them weren’t even on duty. They just responded, and so they weren’t in uniform. They were just in whatever, their regular clothes, and they were just running in,” she said. “Guam had a lot to be proud of that night ... It was a horrific, horrific tragedy. But there were so many people who were just so heroic that night, or that morning, and I think they saved a lot of lives. I saw it myself. I saw them saving lives.”
Joseph San Agustin, now a pilot with Asia Pacific Airlines, was a Navy liaison officer with the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of the crash. He said an islandwide safety drill was planned that day.
His phone rang at 3 a.m.
“The call was not a drill. The Navy was surprised because we were waiting for a drill, but it happened to be the real thing. That was the misfortune of it,” said San Agustin.
When he got to the site, San Agustin said he was taken aback because the tail of the aircraft was there, but the rest of the aircraft was in pieces that barely resembled a plane.
“It was really torn up. At first, you would never believe that a 747 can crunch against a hill like that,” he said.
San Agustin said part of his job was coordinating Navy helicopters to airlift survivors to hospitals and remove the dead.
“People were sliding down the hillside trying to get to the crash site. It was hard. The crash fire personnel were still in heavy gear, boots helmets and stuff. They were slipping and sliding, scrambling down the hill because the adrenaline was on.”
“They had to save people,” said San Agustin.
He worked the scene of the crash for 68 days.
The memorial monument, near Nimitz Hill, dedicated to the air crew and passengers who perished in the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801, as seen July 29, 2022.
The National Transportation Safety Board report described the accident as a “controlled flight into terrain,” and concluded the probable cause “was the captain’s failure to adequately brief and execute the non-precision approach and the first officer’s and flight engineer’s failure to effectively monitor and cross-check the captain’s execution of the approach.”
Fatigue, inadequate crew training and problems with the minimum safe altitude warning system on Guam were listed as continuing factors.
In March 1998, a public hearing was held in Honolulu, which Sterne covered as a reporter.
She said one of the main issues that was discussed, and one of the changes that has been instituted as a result of the crash, involves subordinate officers challenging a captain. In the case of Flight 801, “the copilot knew that the pilot was too low,” Sterne said. “The copilot was trying to tell him, and the pilot was getting mad at him because, you know, he felt it wasn’t his place to question his authority. And then they crashed.”
San Agustin said since the crash, changes have been made. Lower-ranking crew members are supposed to challenge a higher-ranking officer if they notice a mistake that will endanger lives.
“Communication and open dialogue in the cockpit was a problem on that flight,” he said. “You’re not going to see a lot of that these days. Now pilots are not reluctant to speak up.”
Almost 25 years ago, Guam’s most significant aviation disaster occurred in the early morning hours just before sunrise.
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