Philippine Airlines Flight 434 (sometimes referred to as PAL434 or PR434) was a scheduled flight on December 11, 1994, from Manila to Tokyo with a quick stopover in Cebu on a Boeing 747-283B that was seriously damaged by a bomb, killing one passenger and damaging vital control systems, although the plane was in a repairable state. The bombing was a test run of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attacks. The Boeing 747 was flying the second leg of a route from Mactan–Cebu International Airport in Cebu, Philippines to Narita International Airport, in Tokyo, Japan. After the bomb detonated, 58-year-old veteran pilot Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes was able to land the aircraft, saving it and the remaining passengers and crew.

Authorities later discovered that Ramzi Yousef, a passenger on the aircraft's prior flight leg from Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport, had placed the explosive. In order to not get caught, Yousef boarded the flight under the false name "Armaldo Forlani", which was an incorrect spelling of Arnaldo Forlani, the Prime Minister of Italy from 1980–1981. Yousef was later convicted of committing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City. It first flew on February 17, 1979, and was delivered to Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) on March 2, 1979, as SE-DFZ, operating the plane as "Knut Viking". After occasional lease periods with Nigeria Airways and Malaysia Airlines between 1983 and 1988, the aircraft was sold to Guinness Peat Aviation and leased to Philippine Airlines on September 7, 1988.

Crew

The flight crew consisted of the following:

  • Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes Philippine domestic Flight Attendant Maria De La Cruz noticed that Yousef had switched seats during the Manila to Cebu flight and had exited the plane in Cebu alongside the domestic cabin crew, but did not pass this information along to the international flight crew which boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. In addition to Yousef, 25 other passengers also exited the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995. The bomb was, or at least all of its components were, designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid. were commended by President Fidel Ramos for their "professional handling of a potentially disastrous situation" and went their separate ways following the incident. Ed Reyes transferred to Cebu Pacific to work as an Administrative Check Pilot, flight instructor, and DC-9 captain until his retirement in 2002. He served as Board Secretary and Director of Airlink International Aviation School, also working as an aviation course professor in the same institution until his death on February 14, 2007, from prostate cancer. First Officer Jaime Herrera was later promoted to Captain and continued to fly for Philippine Airlines until his retirement in 2008. He died on March 27, 2021, at the age of 73. Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador also moved to Cebu Pacific in 1998 and served as a management pilot in that company, then moved to Philippines AirAsia in 2011 where he served as COO and was later appointed as interim CEO in July 2016 and CEO in January 2017. Comendador retired in July 2019.

The aircraft, then registered as EI-BWF, was later converted to a cargo configuration as Boeing 747-283B(SF). It subsequently changed hands several times, always to air cargo companies, and was finally placed in storage in 2007 at Châteauroux-Centre "Marcel Dassault" Airport.

The events of Flight 434 were featured in "Bomb on Board", a Season 3 episode of the Canadian TV series Mayday