Page 5 - Tail Strike News Today

Happened. and then i started thinking about what kind of technical structural failure could have occurred to create something as devastating as that. i looked at the planes record, as youve talked about. and found that it had this incident in -- i think it was 2001 in cairo where a tail strike is when the plane comes in to land too-far-nosed-up attitude and the tail strikes the tarmac first instead of the wheels. and this is not an unusual event, but apparently this one was very violent, and it ...

It was only 20 minutes in the flight. its entirely possible the seat belt sign was still on. so there is a lot of information there. the black boxes, which i believe are now being read out in cairo, will give us the data. and as i always said, because they have got the debris field and they have the wreckage, this is going to be a textbook investigation. >> richard, i wonder. lets keep these pictures and the video up of the debris field and the investigators looking through the six-mile field he...

And it reported a tail strike incident in 2001 while it was landing in cairo. lets bring in daily beast contributor clive irving, also an expert on aviation, author of "jumbo: the making of the 747." you wrote extensively about this in your piece today, and you talk about that tail strike, but its hard for me to get my head around how a 2001 event on a plane thats repaired and goes on to fly for 14 years, how could that be tied, you think, to what happened yesterday? >> well, the first thing to ...

Required repair. that might mean nothing. >> that might mean absolutely nothing. >> the 321 incidentally is prone to tail strikes, both on takeoff and landing, because it is a stretched version. it is one of the things that 321 pilots are warned about. because it is a longer aircraft, as you rotate, you have to be careful of that. there will be people that will be remembering previous instants where tail strike repairs havent been done properly and there have been failures, in one case, seven ye...

Structural failures, how common is it its repair or maintenance related. >> were finding more and more where its repair related. >> there were at least two suicides in the wake of this incident. a japan airlines employee who was working with victims families and an inspection engineer who issued a certificate of air worthiness for the doomed plane after the 1978 tail strike. to this day, jal 123 remains the deadliest single aircraft accident in the history of aviation. weve seen the disastrous r...

Way 100 miles from the mountain. >> so now you begin to ask the question what could cause a decompression and problems. >> looking at the planes maintenance history, investigators learned there was previous damage to the aft pressure bulk head, the structure in the back of the cabin that keeps the cabin pressurized. it was cracked seven years before the crash. when the planes tail accidently dragged along the runway, in an incident known as a tail strike. >> a tile strike can occur in one of two...

In a sense, its probably the answer is yes to both. so again, the flight data recorder and the voice recorder will shed an awful lot of light on this. >> david gallo, your experience with air france a lot of experts compare to this flight how does where what has been found so far in this flight for in particular flight how does it compare with air france? >> right. in air france it was about five days after the initial tragedy that debris was found, but, you know there was thousands of items fou...

So they knew it had departed the airplane early. so now you begin to ask the question what could cause a decompression, control problems, and the loss of a vertical fin? >> looking at the planes maintenance history, investigators learn there was previous damage to the aft pressure bulkhead. thats the structure at the back of the cabin that keeps the cabin pressurized. it was cracked seven years before the crash. when the planes tail accidentally dragged along the runway in an incident known as a...

>> as a maintainer it pains me to say this, but i think were finding more and more where it is repair related. >> there were at least two suicides in the wake of this incident. a japan airlines employee who was working with victims families and an inspection engineer who issued a certificate of airworthiness for the doomed plane after the 1978 tail strike. to this day, jal 123 remains the deadliest single aircraft accident in the history of aviation. weve seen the disastrous results of airplanes...

Matches with the ear witness and im witness accounts of perhaps the pilot putting in more power to attempt to do a take off again and go around, which would explain the debris tail from a tail strike, those eyewitness and air witness accounts are very, very important. >> so when the ntsb team gets there, obviously it will be night time in san francisco, we assume the bulk of their inspection will come in the morning but they can light it up overnight if they want. they are saying this is one of ...