Last night’s serious incident involving an Emirates A345 departing Melbourne for Dubai as flight EK 407 has caused some very striking images to be posted on the industry site Pprune.org and in the general media.
The jet rotated to an abnormally nose high attitude causing what is known as a ‘tail strike.’ There are reports of up to three tail strikes in succession. This particular tail strike or strikes left metal strewn for tens of metres along the runway, and shows that a considerable portion of the lower fuselage that curves upwards under the tail made unintended contact with the runway at high speed.
The tail strike or strikes occurred at a velocity and airframe loading (fuelled for a 14 hour 45 minute flight) where it would not have been possible to abort the take off without exposing those on board to the extreme perils of an undercarriage failure and/or crashing through the perimeter of the airport.
However after the tail strike the jet gained so little altitude that with its nose still high it struck and damaged landing lights or other objects at the end of the runway.
According to some reports, objects only 150 cms high were struck by the rear of the jet and a jet blast pattern was visible in the grass to either side of the path of the A345.
The Airbus gradually gained a safe altitude, and remained controllable and the pilots began dumping some fuel over Port Philip before making what was reported as a nevertheless overweight emergency landing at the airport.
Reports of smoke and a smell of burning in the cabin were with little doubt the factors in making a decision to land much sooner than it would taken to reduce the weight of the airliner to the maximum limit for a touch down.
A passenger on the flight says that one of the pilots subsequently said he believed some cargo may have shifted during the take off roll. As the A345 has a tail altimeter intended to prevent such incidents this comment may be an important insight into why such a tail strike protection system didn’t kick in.
But as is always the case with serious incidents, there can be many early clues as to what might have happened that can only be verified or discarded in the course of the investigation which the ATSB has already begun.
An ATSB source is reported as saying that ‘long airliners’ are at risk from tail strikes. In fact the A345 is not proportionately long at all, which suggests that the source may have been thinking about the truly long version of this jet, the A340-600 (or A346).
4 Comments
Terrifiying – To hit the near beam antenna is incredibly low. I liked what one of those guys said at pprune.org.
Does having many new pilots, young pilots even, have anything to do with the amount of plane incidents we are having today? It seems that as we rid our selves of more highly experieced pilots more incidents are occuring. With major flight companies introducing new pilots to replace the experienced ones in times of our financial difficulties are they making the right decisions, or in turn are they risking the lives of their passengers?
From what I hear consistently across the industry the main problem in recruiting and retaining pilots is concerned is the larger better paying (or lower taxing) airlines solving the problems of pilot retirements and growth by recruiting from other airlines rather than investing to the necessary degree in their own whole-of-career training programs. Emirates, like other carriers, has swept the world for pilots of all ages that have the experience for all levels from second officers to captains, and check captains.
Of course the growth problem has suddenly disappeared thanks to the global financial crisis. Until recently insufficient pilots were entering the industry to replace retirements or cope with the boom times.
The actual number of incidents and crashes has fallen sharply in terms of metrics like passenger numbers or airliner movements. In that sense, flying remains is astonishingly safe. I haven’t found a contemporary study which examines the age of pilots in relation to incident rates, where stats wise, we’d have to weed out those caused by external factors like bird strikes, or runway incursions by ground vehicles or air or terminal area traffic control errors.
It is very hard to arrive at the truth of the situation, other than conclude that the airlines have failed to invest prudently in pilot training in the early stages of a flying career.
Older pilots are also ‘conserved’ by most carriers I know, and world wide, the pressure to lift mandatory retirement ages reflected the problems airlines were having in keeping pilot numbers up where they belong.
I don’t know the ages of the pilots involved in the EK 407 incident. But there has been speculation that an error was made in entering the correct weight of the aircraft into the flight management computers, something certain to cause problems for any type of jet if the discrepancy was particularly large.
Ben it now seems the dry empty weight used for the weight/balance calculations was 240t rather than 340t, leading by extension to the claim that the aircraft was “100t” over mgtow. I seriously doubt this – 100t is roughly the aircraft’s payload, so that would imply a doubling of the aircraft’s normal payload – a condition in which I doubt it would fly. Just because the calculations wrongly “allowed” for another 100t doesn’t mean the crew used it! Had they done so, even the most fatigued catain must surely have noticed that the numbers looked a bit odd, especially if he had flown the sector before, as I understand was the case. More likely, they put all the freight, pax and fuel they wanted in the aircraft, went seriously, seriously overweight, but not to the extent that a cursory scan of the numbers alerted them to a gross error (and of course the computer was silent on the matter!). This would be a far more interesting case, and one more likely to recur. None of this is to prejudge the outcome of any pending investigation, but do you happen to know the real numbers (a/c dry weight + fuel + freight + pax +logistics, and mgtow)?
I doubt whether this would have happened if the w/b sheet was prepared by hand by the ramp crew, and cross-checked and signed off by the flight crew, as was the case when I was involved in aviation – not because no errors were ever made, and not especially because the cross-checking system worked, although it did, but crucially because all concerned were forced to perform the relevant calculations manually so frequently that they were almost certain to spot a gross error.