On a warm afternoon on the 28th of April 1988 an aloha airlines Boeing 737-200 lost a big portion of its roof due to explosive decompression at 24.000ft.The accident was attributed to two reasons,mainly that the aircraft was operating at a coastal environment with high humidity and many repressurizations of the cabin during a day (island hopping between Hawaiian islands) caused big pressure to the fuselage and finally corrosion of the metal bindings,secondly the aircraft's age at the time (19 years old) and the 89,090 takeoff-landing cycles it had completed well-beyond the 75,000 trips it was designed to sustain were also a contributing factor combined with infrequent and not very thorough inspection for such an old plane at that time.Judging by the images and the amount of damage it is a miracle that the pilot even managed to land the plane and that there was only one fatality that of the flight attendant C.B. Lansing who was literally sucked out of the airplane when the depressurization occurred.As with any accident,new safety measure have been implemented after to avoid something similar to happen,for example U.S. congress passed the Aviation Safety Research Act of 1988, this provided for stricter research into probable causes of future airplane disasters.The plane was written-off and eventually scraped at a Maui metal recycler.
Links:
Airdisaster.com Page of the accident
