HAL Flight 18

HAL Flight 18 was a flight headed towards Wakkanai, Hokkaido which is the northernmost city in Japan. Due to unfortunate circumstances, the plane crashed on January 11th, 2011.

Passengers
The plane held 31 passengers and crew members including:
 * Fuyukawa Kokoro
 * Kusuda Yuni
 * Yomogi Seiji
 * Mayuzumi Lin
 * Suzukage Hotori

According to the newspaper and magazine articles, 27 of the passengers were found dead on January 17th including Hotori who was in a snowfield. When the rescue team arrived, they found Kusuda Yuni as the sole survivor. After the snow thawed, the decomposed corpses of three people were found on July 3rd, 2011. An avalanche occurred at 6:53 AM on January 17th, 2011 at the location where the bodies were found. Although they could not be directly identified, the newspaper and magazine conclude that they must be Kokoro, Yomogi and Mayuzumi since the count matches the number of people missing from Flight 18

Crash and Rescue
The plane's signal was lost at around 3:30 PM on January 11 over the southern mountain range of Aomori Prefecture during the blizzard. After catching fire, the plane crashed on Mount Akakura.

A search was launched to locate the aircraft, but was unsuccessful for 6 days. The reason for their failure is that the plane flew undetected for 30 minutes, during which it covered more ground than predicted. Since the plane moved through a mountainous area with no residents, nobody saw its flight path. The blizzard combined with the solar winds made the investigation even more difficult.

On January 16th, the authorities received a call from a satellite phone (from Yomogi) claiming four passengers from Flight 18 were surviving in the shelter cabin on Mount Akakura. Because of the solar winds, the odds of the satellite phone connecting were one in a million, and without the call, the authorities may have never pinpoint the location of the crash.

The rescuers were unable to make a move since the there was a severe storm from the 15th until the morning of the 17th, so they decided to wait for the storm to die down. They found a break during the afternoon of the 17th and found Yuni. Yuni remained silent about the incident for a year, supposedly due to his mental instability.

In the end, the public is left with the following questions :
 * Why did the passengers leave the cabin
 * What did Yuni see during the 7 days?
 * Why does Yuni refuse to talk about it. Is he hiding some truth?

Reaction
The disappearance of the plane caused the public to speculate wildly about the cause. Guesses ranged from the natural to the supernatural. Some included it getting hit by a fighter plane or missile, while others believed it was kidnapped by a UFO, warped to another dimension or never existed to begin with.

Once the public learned that 3 of the passengers disappeared, some speculated that Yuni had killed the others in a fight for food.