at 11:02 am local time, after a flight time of just over four hours. The aircraft was carrying 167 passengers and 11 crew members on its first leg, and 50 of these passengers disembarked in Paris. The flight's second leg, from Paris to London Heathrow Airport, was normally underbooked; however, due to a strike by British European Airways employees, many London-bound travelers, who had been stranded at Orly, were booked onto Flight 981, delaying the flight's departure by 30 minutes. The aircraft left Orly Airport at 12:32, bound for Heathrow Airport, and took off in an easterly direction, before turning north. Shortly after takeoff, Flight 981 was cleared to flight level 230 () and started turning west towards London. Just after the aircraft passed over the town of Meaux, the rear left cargo door blew off and the sudden difference in air pressure between the cargo area and the pressurized passenger cabin above it, which amounted to , caused a section of the cabin floor above the open hatch to separate and be forcibly ejected through the open hatch, along with six occupied passenger seats attached to that floor section. The fully recognizable bodies of the six Japanese passengers who were ejected from the aircraft landed along with the rear cargo door in a turnip field near Saint-Pathus, approximately south of the crash site. An air traffic controller noted that, as the flight was cleared to FL230, he had briefly seen a second echo on his radar that remained stationary behind the aircraft; this was likely the remains of the rear cargo door. When the door blew off, the primary as well as both sets of backup control cables that ran beneath the section of floor that blew out were completely severed, destroying the pilots' ability to control the plane's elevators, rudder, and number two engine. The flight data recorder showed that the throttle for engine two snapped shut when the door failed. The loss of control of these key components resulted in the pilots losing control of the aircraft entirely. The aircraft almost immediately attained a 20-degree pitch down and began picking up speed, while Captain Berköz and First Officer Ulusman struggled to regain control. At some point, one of the crew members pressed their microphone button broadcasting the pandemonium in the cockpit on the departure frequency. Controllers also picked up a distorted transmission from the plane and the