Original subtitles

A crowded 747 has disappeared over the Atlantic.

Air India's not showing up.

Pieces are found scattered on the ocean's surface.

But the vital clues are deeper than any air crash investigation has ever gone.

In this accident, we had nothing.

It was just mind boggling.

An international recovery effort goes

to the very bottom of the sea to rebuild the shattered plane.

What they discover will send shockwaves around the world.

Mayday! Mayday!

Early morning, June the 23rd, 1985.

A 747 flies across the Atlantic Ocean, 9.5 kilometers above the water.

The jumbo jet is nicknamed Kanishka,

after an Indian emperor...

and Air India promises passengers it will be a palace in the sky.

Indian hospitality

is something that the culture prides itself on.

And you do experience that when you fly Air India.

The colors are rich and warm inside...

It's your gateway to India.

On its way from Canada,

the plane is heading to London, England,

before continuing on to New Delhi.

It's been in the air for four-and-a-half hours.

Captain Hanse Narendra is a veteran Air India pilot.

Satwinder Bhinder is a captain, too,

who's serving as first officer on the flight.

As the plane nears land, Bhinder talks with the flight's purser.

- Yes, sir? - Dinshaw.

Do me a small favor.

At the back of the plane, seat 54, a boy is sitting there.

He just wanted to have a look in the cockpit.

Can I send him now?

After about 15-20 minutes.

There are 329 people on board, including passengers and crew.

Many of them are flying to India to visit family or friends.

Vishnu Pada is traveling to India with his two daughters.

Their mother, Lata, is already waiting for them there.

We had decided that it would be the ideal year

to take an extended vacation

in India as a family.

Six minutes after 08:00 in the morning,

co-pilot Bhinder makes radio contact

with Air Traffic Control in Ireland.

Shanwick, Air India 182. Good morning.

Station calling Shannon. Go ahead again, please.

Thomas Lane and Michael Quinn

are working at the Shannon Control Center.

Air India 182 is 51 North, 15 West, at level 310.

Estimate FIR at 07:35.

Air India 182, Shannon, roger.

Cleared for London, flight level 3-1-0.

Air India 182 is clear to London,

maintain 3-1-0.

Do you want to come up front now?

- Yeah. - Okay.

Let's go.

It's a light morning at Shannon Control.

They're dealing with just three planes.

But something peculiar has happened.

The signals are all jumbled up.

The signals on radar merged

so that it was totally impossible

to read the call signs and flight levels

of any of the three aircraft.

The Air India 747 is flying at 31,000 feet.

A TWA jet is several thousand feet above it

and a CP flight is 2,000 feet higher.

All are traveling east.

Because the planes are stacked on top of each other,

the signals have merged on the controllers' two-dimensional screen.

Tom moved a tracker ball on radar

and separated the signals.

Two of the planes reappear on the radar,

but the Air India flight has vanished.

Air India is not showing up.

Hold on a minute.

Air India 182, do you read?

Air India 182, this is Shannon. Do you read? Over.

It's 08:14 in the morning.

I had a gut feeling.

To this day, I don't know why I picked up the phone.

Yes, it's Michael Quinn at Shannon.

We have a plane off-radar.

Normally, a distress call to Search and Rescue

isn't made until a plane has been out of contact for more than 20 minutes.

The Air India flight has been missing less than 60 seconds.

Several ships in the area begin searching for signs of the plane.

Its last known position is some 290 kilometers southwest of Cork.

Just two hours after the plane disappears,

a Canadian owned cargo ship in the area confirms the worst.

The first pieces of wreckage are discovered.

Uninflated life rafts are spotted bobbing in the cold Atlantic.

Then bodies are seen.

It's quickly clear that no one has survived.

In India, Lata Pada is waiting for her husband and two children to arrive,

when she hears the news from her brother,

He sat me down and told me that,

uh, you know, something terrible had happened.

But I was just... uh, in total shock, and...

You know, a part of me was trying to digest the information,

and part of me was trying to imagine

if indeed the worst had happened,

how I was gonna continue my life without them.

Dozens of bodies arrive in Cork.

Many more will follow.

Now investigators are faced with the enormous task

of finding out how they died,

and what had caused the crash of Air India Flight 182.

One hundred and thirty thousand people live in the city of Cork.

Tucked into the southern coast of Ireland,

it's long been a vital seaport.

On June the 23rd, 1985, a gruesome cargo begins arriving at the city's docks.

Just hours after Air India Flight 182 crashes into the sea,

bodies and wreckage are brought in by boat.

Dr. Cuimin Doyle is a pathologist at the Cork Regional Hospital.

The first bodies arrived at 04:45 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon.

And at 12:00 midnight, we had 130 bodies.

Doyle and his team will examine the bodies

to see if they can find any signs of what caused the crash.

It's an enormous undertaking for everybody involved.

The hospital personnel, the...

the police, the Navy, the Army, and...

pathologists like ourselves, but,

we just had to get on and do the job.

There are so many autopsies to perform,

that Doyle moves the work into the building's gym.

We had three police people working on each body.

Photographer, a ballistics expert, and a forensic odontologist.

That is a person who examines the teeth, the face...

for identification purposes.

In just four days,

autopsies are performed on 132 victims.

All parts of the body were examined externally in detail,

and every... every detail was noted down.

We were looking, of course, for the causes of the fatalities.

Doyle makes a telling discovery.

Almost all the victims died in the air.

Only two of the bodies showed signs of drowning,

which indicated that the others

were... were not breathing when they hit the water.

There's something else that's common to many of the victims.

A large number have had their clothes torn off.

Now that was important because if they had no clothes or little clothes,

it indicated that they had fallen

from 31,000 feet or so,

where this accident occurred.

Some of the bodies also have signs of so-called flail injuries.

These are breaks specific to bones in the hips, shoulders, and other joints.

H.S. Khola is the lead investigator into the Air India disaster.

The flail injuries tell him the passengers

weren't in the plane when it hit the ocean.

They are caused by tumbling, violent motion of the body in air.

And that is the pattern of the injuries

when a passenger is thrown out of the aircraft at a high altitude.

The autopsies show that somehow the plane had been ripped apart

high above the water.

Passengers were thrown into the sky long before the plane crashed.

Based on the injuries,

we could only say that the plane

had broken up at 31,000 feet.

We couldn't say what the cause of the breakup was.

The biggest challenge in this accident

was that we had no physical evidence

available to us in this accident,

in terms of wreckage, in terms of passengers, crew,

or in terms of eyewitnesses.

In this accident, we had nothing.

The most important job of the investigators

is to try to find the plane's black boxes.

The two devices record cockpit conversation

and other technical information about the flight of the plane.

The recorders have radio beacons which send out a signal

at a designated frequency.

But it's still a huge task.

The boxes are more than 6,500 feet below the surface,

and the radio signals last just 30 days.

Salim Jiwa is a journalist who has investigated the Air India disaster.

The search for the black boxes was urgent.

And, and...

three countries participated in it.

England, Ireland, and India.

But even with such a massive response,

early efforts are frustrated.

Forty-two kilohertz.

It's too high.

Can't be them.

Investigators are picking up radio signals,

but they're at the wrong frequency.

As the search continues,

H.S. Khola and his team study the maintenance history of the plane.

They want to know if an undetected flaw

had caused the jet to come apart in flight.

They uncover a potentially important piece of information.

The Air India jet was flying with five engines,

A 747 normally has four engines.

But it can carry more.

The plane was designed so that it could transport

a malfunctioning engine beneath its wings.

Ground crews can mount the engine to a bracket on the plane.

It's exactly what happened to the Air India jet.

There was an extra engine that a previous flight

had left behind that was mounted on the wing of the aircraft.

The extra engine creates substantial drag on the left side of the plane.

If the pilots don't properly compensate,

the plane will start turning in that direction.

And this hypothesis continued that there is a possibility

that this fifth engine might have caused the breakup of the plane.

In fact, investigators discover

that before the plane took off for London,

the flight engineer noticed problems with the way the engine was attached.

There's a small problem in the fifth engine.

Have asked them to fix it up.

All right.

Investigators also learned that

some internal parts of the extra engine

were taken out and stored in Flight 182's cargo bay.

They are so enormous that pieces of the cargo door

were removed to make the job easier.

Some of the other parts of the engine went into the rear of the aircraft.

Aircraft such as the 747 can handle this quite easily. It's routinely done.

But if the cargo door wasn't reassembled properly,

it could have led to an explosive decompression.

In 1974, a cargo door blew off a Turkish Airlines flight

shortly after it took off from Paris.

The sudden decompression crippled the plane.

It crashed moments later, killing everyone on board.

Khola must consider two theories.

Either problems with the door,

or with the extra engine itself brought down the plane.

If either one had taken place, there should be evidence on the plane's black boxes.

Finding the recorders has become increasingly important.

Almost two weeks after the search begins,

investigators get news that helps them pinpoint the location of the black boxes.

The signal will be higher?

So this 42 kilohertz could be it.

Tell the boats to look again.

The piece of the black box,

which broadcasts the locator signal is made of ceramic.

If it's damaged, the frequency of the signal can change.

It means the strange frequency ships detected earlier

could be the right one.

Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are finally located.

But they're so deep, it's difficult to bring them up.

The aircraft was at 6,000 feet below the sea,

and it was the depth that was sort of defeating.

A deep sea submersible is brought in.

But even with this specialized vehicle,

and with the location of the black boxes known,

it takes four attempts to bring the recorders to the surface.

Estimate FIR at 07:35.

Air India 182, Shannon, roger. Cleared for London...

Lead investigator Khola now has what he hopes

are two vital pieces of the puzzle.

If there's any problem with the aircraft,

the crew will be talking about the problem.

They will not be silent about the problem.

But when he listens to the cockpit voice recorder,

Khola hears nothing unusual.

After the last contact with Air Traffic Control in Shannon,

the voice recorder picks up the crew talking about customs seals.

Custom seals to seal the bar before the arrival...

It's paperwork that has to be completed before landing.

They want about 30 customs seals.

- Customs? - Yeah.

Customs seals to seal the bar before its arrival.

Bar--

The conversation ends in mid-sentence.

That was it. And then everything was, of course, silent.

The cockpit voice recorder indicated that there was

no abnormality in the cockpit.

No... No emergency.

Every conversation was normal.

The plane's flight data recorder tells a similar story.

Khola pours through details about Air India's speed,

altitude, and dozens of other pieces of information.

The extra engine did cause the plane to bank slightly.

And the jet's rudder was turned 11 degrees to the right.

But this was exactly what the crew needed to do

to offset the drag created by the fifth engine.

We found that all parameters of the aircraft,

aircraft altitude, aircraft heading,

aircraft bank attitude, roll attitude, auto-pilot engage...

Everything was working normally till the last point.

After analyzing both black boxes,

Khola can't find any evidence that the plane was in trouble

before it suddenly disappeared from radar.

But the very lack of evidence does suggest something.

Both recorders get their power from the plane's engines.

Both stopped at exactly 40 minutes and one second after 08:00 in the morning.

Since the recorders stopped working at the same time,

the problem on the plane had to be catastrophic enough

to sever the jet's electronic system before the crew could react.

Yeah, customs seals to seal the bar before its arrival.

Bar--

Investigators are becoming convinced

that there are only two possible explanations for the crash.

A devastating decompression, or a bomb.

They study the wreckage that's been found floating on the surface of the ocean.

But it's just a small percentage of the entire plane,

and none of it is helpful to investigators.

It offers no clues to explain why the plane crashed.

We knew there was no fire.

We knew the aircraft was performing well.

Everything was normal. There was no cockpit emergency, no warning.

We got elimination of all the things,

but we did not got the answer as what happened.

We have to go to the cause of the accident.

We had to go to the wreckage,

which was lying at the bottom of the sea.

But what parts of the plane should investigators focus on?

The black boxes were equipped with radio transmitters,

which made them easier to find.

But the debris field is deep underwater

and enormous, some 16 kilometers long,

and six kilometers across.

How do investigators identify the one clue that will help them unlock the mystery?

Roy Truman is an underwater salvage expert.

He's brought in to do something that's never been done before.

Retrieve the ruined pieces of a jumbo jet from the bottom of the ocean.

In hundreds of thousands of pieces,

he needs to find the ones that will explain why the plane crashed.

Up until that time, we had only been used

with recovering small aircraft.

Here we're talking about a 747, which was huge,

and we had no idea of the size of the pieces and what we were gonna find.

Investigators know they can't bring the entire wreck to the surface.

It's so deep it takes hours to recover a single piece.

The submersible takes underwater video and still photos.

Investigators use those to decide which pieces to bring to the surface.

It was a narrow corridor, and at each end of the corridor

it was very light wreckage.

All of the heavy stuff,

engines, main aircraft structure, was...

was in the middle of the wreckage field.

Like searching for a needle in an underwater haystack,

investigators hope to discover the cause of the crash in a tangle of ruined metal.

But autumn is coming.

Soon, the weather will turn bad,

and they'll have to abandon their search.

The key to unlocking the disaster

still lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

Investigators from India are scouring the ocean floor,

trying to find out why Air India Flight 182 fell from the sky.

As the work continues in Ireland, there's growing suspicion in Canada

that the Air India crash was no accident.

As police and investigators sift through the list of passengers on the plane,

they find something peculiar.

Many of the passengers who were on Air India Flight 182

began their day in Vancouver.

They were using another plane to connect to Flight 182.

One of the passengers who bought a ticket for that plane

never got on.

Well, the passenger, um...

we have never identified him per se,

but the ticket identified him as M. Singh.

Uh, it simply had an initial but no full name.

Uh, we believe that name to be... was fictitious...

And that the person never intended to travel.

While he never boarded the plane,

M. Singh did check in.

Next, please.

New York to Toronto?

And I want my bag checked through to Delhi.

Sir, I can't do that.

Your reservation is only confirmed to Toronto.

Oh, I am confirmed.

This is my ticket.

Jeannie Adams is a ticket agent

working for Canadian Pacific.

Mr. Singh...

You are on standby to Delhi. I can't.

But then I have to pick up my bag.

I can't check your bags through to India

if you are not confirmed.

But I am indeed confirmed.

Wait. I'll get my brother.

He'll tell you.

There are as many as 30 people waiting to check in.

Sir, your reservation is only confirmed...

Adams doesn't have time to wait for the man's brother.

Uh, okay, okay. I'll check it through.

But you have to check with Air India when you get to Toronto.

Your seat is 10-B.

Even though Singh doesn't have a ticket

taking him to India, his bag is checked straight through.

His luggage is loaded.

But no one notices that Singh never boards the plane

that leaves Vancouver.

She broke the rules as they were.

She should not have allowed that

to go through for a New Delhi interline.

But she was so bullied and so browbeaten

by Mr. Singh in front of everybody else,

that I think, to her eternal sadness and... and heartbreak,

um, she gave in.

Singh's marooned bag didn't raise any concerns

when it was loaded in Vancouver.

Since the Air India flight was international,

when the bag arrived in Toronto,

it faced a more strict series of inspections.

This is what it will sound like.

John de Souza is a security officer for Air India.

The day of the flight, he demonstrated a portable explosives detector

for baggage handlers in Toronto.

Chemicals in a match triggered the device,

as would chemicals used in some explosives.

Okay?

The portable device was put to use because the X-ray machine,

which normally scans every piece of luggage, had broken down.

The technology, especially the X-ray technology,

were very... very weak,

very in their infancy at that time, and it didn't work reliably.

And in the case of the Air India episode,

the technology went quite badly wrong,

which was one of the tragedies of this situation.

As security workers use the portable explosives wand on the bags,

everything seemed normal until they got to the maroon bag.

The bag did trigger the device.

But the sound it made was very different

from the one workers heard during the demonstration.

The bag was passed and allowed on board the plane,

eventually flying towards England.

As Air India Flight 182 flies

over the Atlantic Ocean carrying M. Singh's bag,

an explosion rips through Tokyo's Narita Airport.

Two baggage handlers are killed.

Four people are injured.

A bomb has been hidden inside another piece of luggage

that came from Vancouver.

Luggage that was bound for another Air India jet.

And it was headed for the cargo hold

when it exploded on the ground.

Once it was put on, the bag was

probably just thumped a little bit, and...

it exploded as the...

the two Japanese baggage handlers

were putting it on a conveyor belt.

Just as on Flight 182, one of the bags being moved in Tokyo,

was checked in by a passenger who never boarded the flight.

There was no X-ray machines in use at Vancouver Airport.

There was nothing to stop that bag from flying to Tokyo.

There's a disturbing connection

between the Tokyo bombing and the Air India flight.

The tickets for the men who checked both bags

were bought on the same day by the same customer.

The single crash of Air India Flight 182

has suddenly become part of a much larger story.

With the apparent connection between the two incidents,

investigators in Ireland are extremely interested in what police find in Tokyo.

Soon after the bombing, forensic experts descend on Japan's Narita Airport.

There are traces of evidence everywhere.

The Narita bombing, um, was within a confined space.

So unlike the Air India Flight 182 situation

where we had debris scattered over nine miles of...

under the ocean and pretty hard to retrieve,

we had the, in a sense, the good fortune

of a contained area where an explosive device went off.

Pieces of metal and circuit boards are embedded in the walls.

Explosive residue clings to parts of the container that housed the bomb.

Amazingly, Japanese forensic experts were able to pick out

tiny parts and fragments and all the analysis

finally led Japanese police to identify the vehicle

that was used to carry the bomb.

Experts even find serial numbers on pieces of the wreckage,

clues that show the bomb was hidden inside a specific stereo tuner

made by Sanyo.

All 2,000 tuners that were ever made

were shipped to a warehouse near Vancouver, British Columbia.

From there, they were sent to stores across the region.

One of those tuners carried the bomb that exploded at Narita.

Police have a difficult task trying to trace the sale of 2,000 tuners.

They could have been sold to anyone.

Most of the stores that had received the tuner had been sold out for years.

But police get a break when they ask about the tuner

at a store in Duncan, a tiny town on Vancouver Island.

The last unit had been sold just a few weeks ago.

They were able to figure out

who bought the stereo tuner which contained the bomb.

Police obtained the same sort of tuner

that was used to house the bomb on Air India.

They conduct tests to see how big the bomb would have to be

to create the sort of damage that was found in Tokyo.

There was a progressive experimentation

using dynamite...

...to find out the extent of damage

particular strengths of dynamite would cause.

They match the size of the tuner fragments made after each explosion

with the fragments that were found at Narita.

They discover that just a few sticks of dynamite

were likely used in the Tokyo bomb.

But could just four sticks of dynamite really bring down a jet?

Once they discover just how powerful the Narita bomb was,

police place it into a fully loaded luggage container.

The devastation is enormous.

Any decompression caused by an event,

or an explosive device in the luggage hold

would be sufficient to cause catastrophic results for that aircraft.

You don't need much.

Four sticks of dynamite can do the job.

The cramped quarters of a cargo hold amplify the power of a bomb.

Tests conducted at Penn State University

show that the shockwaves created from a bomb blast

don't travel in just one direction,

but reverberate inside a luggage container,

building on each other,

vastly increasing the initial force of the explosion.

If a bomb had indeed exploded in the cargo hold of Air India,

it would have caused enormous amounts of destruction.

It's the sort of damage that should have left its mark

on the remains of Flight 182.

Investigators have a growing suspicion

that this plane was brought down by a bomb.

But they still have no proof.

So the investigators were

not only looking for, uh,

something that was broken that might have caused the failure, but,

they were looking for signs

of what caused the explosion,

such as burning, or solvent stains,

or possibly shrapnel in seats.

It meant a lot tighter scrutiny of every piece of wreckage.

We kept on analyzing each photograph.

Is it giving any indication of an explosion?

Is it giving any impact damage?

Knowing his time is running out,

Khola selects a few key pieces of the plane

to bring to the surface.

Bad weather forces him to leave the rest behind.

Khola hopes the bits he does have can prove there was a bomb on board.

Each piece that's brought up is carefully mapped

to its original position on the jet.

One of the most promising sections brought up from the bottom

is the floor of the front cargo bay.

When we recovered that item, we found

that it had holes which are of a very special nature,

penetration from inside to outside at a very high speed,

curling of the edges of that one.

And that was indicative of,

that perhaps this is the place where the explosion had occurred.

As many as 20 holes are found.

In each, the metal is bent outward, like the petals of a flower.

These are classic signs of something being blown out from the cargo bay.

On the side wall of the cargo bay, investigators find more clues.

Additional holes are discovered, like the ones on the floor.

These also appear to have been blown out from the cargo hold.

A closer study of the ceiling of the cargo bay also indicates that

the ribs connecting it to the fuselage were broken by being forced up.

Investigators are convinced that the wreckage shows

that a bomb had exploded in the forward cargo hold.

If the bomb had gone off in the front of the plane,

it would explain why the flight data recorder

and cockpit voice recorder cut off so quickly.

Like other 747s,

the electronics bay on the Air India flight is located below the cockpit.

Many of the important electrical systems on the plane run through here.

The forward luggage compartment is right beside it.

And so, when the bomb went off,

the explosion would have taken out the computers completely,

and there would have been absolutely dead silence.

And that's precisely what happened.

Investigators are convinced that Air India Flight 182

has been destroyed by a bomb.

This was no accident.

The crash of the passenger jet was a crime.

Nobody. Nobody... thought

that such an evil plot

of blowing two aircrafts simultaneously would occur from Vancouver.

Exhaustive detective work creates a clear picture

of what likely happened on board the Air India jet.

In Toronto,

M. Singh's bag is taken off the Vancouver flight

and moved onto the Air India jet.

It's put into a luggage container

that's eventually placed at the front of the jet...

right behind the plane's electronics bay.

As the plane sailed over the Atlantic Ocean,

the crew had no warning that a bomb was ticking down to disaster.

They want about 30 custom seats.

Customs?

Yeah, custom seals. To seal the bar before its arrival.

Bar--

When the force of the blast hit the floor of the jet,

it pushed it violently upwards.

The thin fuselage would have been blown apart.

The air pressure inside the plane would have rushed out

tearing passengers from the cabin and fatally crippling the jet.

The debris, scattered over nine miles,

is an indication of how...

how rapidly and how...

how fearsome this whole decompression was.

But in this instance, the aircraft completely

didn't stand a chance of flight.

There was no way of continuing flight in this case.

As the jet fell towards the sea,

the forces put on the fuselage tore it apart.

It would have a tail torn off and the wings would start breaking...

and there's no way of sustaining flight after that.

It goes into gyrations.

Once it goes into gyrations, there was just massive structural failure.

After months of painstaking work,

investigators believe they have unraveled the cause of the Air India crash.

They've proven a bomb brought the plane down.

It's now up to police to find the bombers.

But with so many deaths, and so many more possible

if the Narita bomb had exploded in midair,

there's immediate interest in making passenger jets safer.

This was one of the biggest disaster

in the Indian aviation history.

And it could have been avoided

if the procedures were in place.

As the hunt for the killers continues,

extraordinary steps are taken to tighten security

and to see if jets can be made to withstand the force of a bomb.

It's May 19th, 1997,

more than ten years after a terrorist bomb

destroyed Air India Flight 182.

An out of service 747

is about to take part in a remarkable test.

Two bombs are placed in the front cargo bay.

Two more are put in the back.

Well, the Bruntingthorpe test was actually

intended to prove five years' worth of research.

That we can protect an airplane

using hardened luggage containers,

or hard liners in the cargo hold.

The plane is also pressurized to simulate the conditions

a jet would encounter at cruising altitude.

Pressurization is the key to that kind of experiment.

The added energy that you have from the pressurization inside the airplane

adds to the damage.

You can think of it as a balloon.

If you take a pin and you put it in a balloon

that's un inflated, you get just a simple hole...

the size of the pin.

However, if you blow that balloon up

and you hit it with a pin, it pops catastrophically.

When the bombs are detonated...

the result is devastating.

The force of the blast, plus the pressure inside the jet just tore the plane apart.

And that's the closest we can come to seeing

what would have happened to a jet in flight.

The destructive power of bombs on jets is well known.

But what the tests at Bruntingthorpe showed

was that relatively simple measures

can substantially minimize the damage caused by an explosion.

One of the bombs in the rear cargo hold

was placed in a normal luggage container.

But the bombs in the front cargo hold were different.

One was placed in a specialized container

strengthened with a material similar to that found in bulletproof vests.

The other was put in a normal container,

but placed beside walls

that had been reinforced

with a blast absorbing liner.

When the bombs explode, the front of the plane is virtually untouched.

We had no breach of the airplane skin with the liner

or with the hardened luggage containers.

But towards the rear of the airplane, or the tail,

where we didn't have any of the hardened materials,

there was a catastrophic failure for the airplane.

The standard luggage container did nothing to minimize the blast.

Both the protective lining in the front cargo bay

and the hardened luggage container were able to absorb

the force of the explosion.

It's only speculation. Would steps like these have saved Air India?

Very likely.

Would they make the industry safer today?

Absolutely.

Despite the dramatic results of the tests in Britain,

hardened luggage containers are not used by the world's airlines.

While effective at stopping bombs,

they're extremely expensive.

The hardened containers are not in use now,

because it's just not economically feasible.

The containers cost tens of thousands of dollars just to purchase,

and they're very fragile, they're composite material,

so if you run into the side of them with a forklift,

they're pretty much useless from that point forward.

There have been significant improvements made

to the way that passenger luggage

is screened at most international airports.

More sophisticated color X-ray systems

using multiple scanning beams are now used.

But I am indeed confirmed.

Wait. I'll get my brother.

He'll tell you.

Uh, okay, okay. I'll check it through.

But you have to check with Air India when you get to Toronto.

And there are stricter regulations about luggage getting sent forward

on connecting flights.

In the case of Air India, the most important thing of all

was passenger baggage reconciliation.

This is the key...

to detecting an explosive device, or a terrorist.

No plane leaves

with baggage unattached to a specific passenger

inside that plane.

And that must be so.

Your seat is 10-B.

I think one of the...

the most difficult piece...

of news for the families to accept

was the many ways in which this tragedy could have been prevented.

I mean, it was...

absolutely unforgivable that a bag could be interlined

to another destination without a passenger accompanying it.

The quality of training that security guards at airports get

also came under scrutiny during the years after the Air India crash.

It's still an area of concern for some security experts.

There's a real failure to train security personnel.

And that failure

is because you cannot pay rent-a-cops subsistence wages

to look after your security when you get on board an aircraft.

In the Air India case,

police eventually traced the bombing to Sikh extremists living in Canada.

They're fighting to have an independent Sikh homeland created in India.

The man who confessed to assembling the bomb is sent to prison.

The man suspected of masterminding the plot

is killed several years later while under arrest in India.

Both men had deep ties to Canada's West Coast Sikh community,

It's a connection that still bothers Lata Pada.

It was a deliberate act of terrorism

and hurts even more that they were executed by Canadians,

on Canadian soil, against Canadians.

More than 20 years after the destruction of the Air India flight,

the shock of the day is still fresh.

And many questions remain unanswered.

We still don't know who the two people were who checked in the bags.

Apart from the basics of,

uh, who made the bomb,

we don't know much about who else assisted him.

We don't know who picked up those tickets.

There's a vow of silence that has hindered the investigation.

This inquiry will be launched immediately.

In 2006, the Canadian government

launched an inquiry into the Air India bombing.

Another investigation of what happened and why.

The shocking death of so many is

a continuing source of anger and disbelief.

No matter what the inquiry finds, the sobering facts are the same.

Three hundred and twenty-nine people killed in an instant.

There are memorials now in Ireland and Canada,

mourning the victims of the Air India crash,

marking the day a terrorist bomb ripped through the lives of so many.

It's just so tragic about all our lives that we lead.

Every day is an ordinary day in our lives,

but some days,

unexpectedly,

something completely, totally unexpected

shatters your life. And that was one of those moments.