Page 9 - Tail Strike News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 plane's record, as you've 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 caused severe structural damage. so i started to look at the rear end of the plane and what the co...

It was only 20 minutes in the flight. it's 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. let's keep these pictures and the video up of the debris field and the investigators looking through the six-mile field here. what could be gleaned from the pictures that we are seeing now? >> reporter: so far, not a hug...

And it reported a tail strike incident in 2001 while it was landing in cairo. let's 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 it's hard for me to get my head around how a 2001 event on a plane that's 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 realize is it's highly unusual for a plane to break up in the air like this. it's very rare. norm...

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 haven't been done properly and there have been failures, in one case, seven years later. this is just something that's out there. otherwise, the a-321, an extremely reliable, ex...

Structural failures, how common is it it's repair or maintenance related. >> we're finding more and more where it's 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. we've seen the disastrous results of airplanes not properly repaired, maintained or inspected. japan airlines flight 123. ...