Posted on 03/22/2009 8:41:53 PM PDT by libh8er
TOKYO (AFP) — A FedEx cargo plane en route from China crashed in high winds and exploded in a ball of flames Monday at Tokyo's Narita airport, killing both pilots, according to hospital officials.
The pair, said to be US citizens, were reportedly the only two people aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, which was flying in from Guangzhou in southern China.
Television footage showed the three-engine wide-body airplane tip sideways shortly after touch-down in strong winds and then, as one of its wings clipped the ground at high speed, burst into a fireball.
"We confirm the deaths of the two pilots," Katsuji Komiyama, an official at Narita Red Cross hospital told AFP.
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RIP.
High winds and a bounced landing.
RIP.
The pilot should have aborted the landing and executed a go around. He tilted way too much too close to the ground to correct for side winds that his wing tip touched the ground and cause the plane to flip over. Many avoidable crashes have occurred because pilots thought they could have pulled off a landing in adverse conditions when the landing should have been aborted.
No let me take that back. The plane tilted as a result of bouncing, not because the pilot was trying to correct heading.
I’ve looked that footage over quite a few times.
The landing initially looks like it will be hard and fast, but inside the envelope, then something (wind shear? turbulence?) suddenly causes the plane to assume a nose up attitude and gain about 50 feet in altitude whereupon it appears to enter into a classic unrecoverable stall.
The pilot puts the nose down to gain airspeed as all pilots are taught to do, and probably adds throttle at the same time, but there just isn’t enough altitude to complete the maneuver and the aircraft encounters the ground in a nose down attitude and flips over in a ball of flame.
I can’t say that this is what happened as there are just too many unknowns, but this is what it looks like to me.
Not being a pilot, I will not opine on the go-around - but let’s just say that was one bad ride. I saw a BBC headline that called it a “crash landing”. Perhaps it’s a fine point - but that was a landing that turned into a crash. A “crash landing” strikes me as a landing with malfunctioning gear, etc.
Maybe the pilot tried to abort the landing and stalled while trying to climb out?
I’m reminded of some of those “crab-wise” landings jets often do in a cross-wind. I understand this sort of landing is extremely difficult to do with a tanker. Maybe the same sort of problems are encountered by cargo aircraft.
Maybe. But a pilot would not start a climb out in that way. The rule is, first power, then altitude. This plane shed kinetic energy like nobody’s business with the nose up like that. Once the plane took that nose-up attitude, I think there was no way to recover that close to the ground.
It would be nice to see what led up to the start of the video. I am thinking it was just a case of touching down on the nose wheel first leading to the porpoising. If the smoke on the left of the first frames was from the mains it is too close in a horizontal sense relative to the height of the nose wheel. We won’t know until someone looks at the tape.
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