JAL 1628: Fifty Minutes Over Alaska With Something the FAA Could Not Confirm
The sun had already slipped below the horizon when Captain Kenju Terauchi first mistook the glow ahead of him for the running lights of another aeroplane. It was a few minutes past five in the afternoon on 17 November 1986, and Japan Air Lines cargo flight 1628 was cruising at 35,000 feet over the frozen interior of eastern Alaska. The aircraft was a Boeing 747-246F freighter, loaded with French wine and flying the long polar routing that carried European cargo to Japan by way of Alaska: out of Paris, down to a refuelling stop in Anchorage, then on to Tokyo. It was passing near the small settlement of Fort Yukon when the lights appeared.
Terauchi was not a nervous novice. He was a former fighter pilot with more than 10,000 hours in the air. In the cockpit with him were two other experienced men: First Officer Takanori Tamefuji, at the controls beside him, and Flight Engineer Yoshio Tsukuba, at the engineer's panel behind.
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