Audio By Carbonatix

Imagine you’ve been on a long-haul flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris for hours. During the airplane’s final descent, you smell something odd. Then the cabin fills with smoke. Passengers around you cough, struggle to breathe, and pass out. You realize the smoke is thinner at the front of the plane, so you get out of your seat to climb forward. But the crew shouts at you to sit down, saying everyone must stay in their seats. What do you do?

The 124 passengers on Varig Airlines flight 820 to Paris struggled with this exact dilemma in 1973. Why? Likely because a single cigarette tossed into the bathroom trash can lit a large enough fire that the air onboard became impossible to breathe. It got so bad that Relief Captain Antonio Fuzimoto gave up on reaching Paris, Orly airport. He put the plane down in a field just five kilometers short of the runway.

When rescuers opened the doors, they found 123 passengers had died of smoke inhalation, many before the plane even landed. The crew fled forward to the cabin. Of the 17 crew members, 10 survived. Only one passenger disobeyed the crew’s orders to stay in his seat. Twenty-one-year-old Ricardo Trajano forced his way forward, and survived.

Aftermath of the Varig Flight 820 disaster

After the disaster, the FAA issued AD 74-08-09. It ordered airlines to either install ashtrays or prohibit smoking. The law required: “installation of placards prohibiting smoking in the lavatory and disposal of cigarettes in the lavatory waste receptacles; establishment of a procedure to announce to airplane occupants that smoking is prohibited in the lavatories; installation of ashtrays at certain locations; and repetitive inspections to ensure that lavatory waste receptacle doors operate correctly.”

The primary captain of Varig Flight 820 was Araujo da Silva. He survived the smoke, living to fly again. But in January 1979, he captained Varig Flight 967, a cargo run from Japan to Rio–with a stopover in Los Angeles. The six crew members updated the airport tower 22 minutes after takeoff, then set off across the Pacific. Then the crew and plane disappeared and have never been found.