Call it the smoothest crash-landing of all time. Call it the “Miracle on the Bay.”

Fifty years ago this month, a Japan Air Lines DC-8 belly-flopped into San Francisco Bay 17,000 feet short of the San Francisco International Airport runway. No one was hurt. In fact, most passengers didn’t even get their feet wet. With the half-century anniversary approaching, a trip to The Chronicle’s archive turned up photos from the crash that haven’t been published in decades.

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According to The Chronicle edition of Nov. 23, 1968, the previous day’s splash-down was a calm affair. “With absolutely no panic, (the passengers) donned life jackets, boarded the plane’s five lifeboats, and were towed by police and Coast Guard boats to the Coyote Point Yacht Harbor a quarter-mile away.”

Airport officials said the Coyote Point Reef was the ideal spot in the bay to land. If the plane had landed only a few feet away, they said, it would have sunk deep into the soft mud floor below the water.

Once everyone realized the passengers and crew were safe, the goal became salvaging the downed jetliner with as little damage as possible.

“We’ve got to get that plane out of there within 24 hours, or it will just be an $8.3 million piece of junk,” said Art Reinholm, the supervisor of the salvage project.

Even though two huge derricks mounted on barges were in place by 10 the first night, Reinholm and his crew had to hold firm, waiting for the go-ahead from investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Japanese Transportation Ministry.

At 3:20 p.m. Nov. 24, two days after the crash, rigging supervisor Bob Korst gave the thumbs-up. Divers had worked for hours to make sure the lifting slings were precisely in position. The four barge cranes started gently lifting the DC-8 out of the bay. By 5 p.m., the plane had been lowered onto a barge. It would be brought ashore and towed to the United Airlines maintenance base to be repaired, though many didn’t think it would be possible.

On March 10, 1969, after $4 million and 52,000 man-hours of work, the pilots took the plane, now nicknamed Shiga, for a 15-minute sightseeing spin, and brought it down with a perfect landing — on land this time.

Shiga would soon begin to carry passengers again, and it would fly until 2001.

More from Chronicle Vault

•Another ‘miracle’ look: Read pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub’s take on the 1968 Japan Air Lines landing near SFO.

•Ready for takeoff: The Concorde supersonic turbojet was a marvel of modern aviation. Take a look back at its stops in the Bay Area.

•Now that’s a party: More than 300,000 people turned out for the debut of San Francisco International Airport. Check out the photos from 1954.

•Chronicle Covers: And you thought SFO was packed for your last flight. Here’s the Aug. 30, 1954, front page from the airport’s debut party.

•High-flying history: Want to know how aviation got its start in the Bay Area? This deep-dive look-back features more than a century of stories about innovators and entrepreneurs who took flight across the region.

From the Archive is a weekly column by Bill Van Niekerken, the library director of The Chronicle, exploring the depths of the newspaper’s archive. It’s part of Chronicle Vault, a twice-weekly newsletter highlighting more than 150 years of San Francisco stories. It is edited by Tim O’Rourke, The Chronicle’s assistant managing editor and executive producer of SFChronicle.com. Sign up for the newsletter here and follow Chronicle Vault on Instagram. Contact Bill at bvanniekerken@sfchronicle.com and Tim at torourke@sfchronicle.com.