website where this was published:
That Tragic MD-11 Safety Record
Subject: WSJ
/Jet's Troubled History/
continued
Yet sometimes, at low altitude, the opposite occurs: Pilots tell of pulling with all their might and finding the plane hardly responded. That can be a problem during landing. In several instances where pilots brought down their MD-11s too rapidly and tried to compensate at the last minute, they smacked the aircraft's tail on the runway or caused other damage.
That's what NTSB investigators reckoned took place in 1997 when FedEx pilots tried to land an MD-11 at Newark. The plane touched down too hard, bounced, rolled right, broke its right wing, flipped over and was destroyed by fire. The two pilots, who escaped, took most of the blame. But the safety board also raised questions about the plane's "stability and control characteristics," the design of its landing gear and why its wing broke off, a rare occurrence in similar hard-landing accidents.
Boeing acknowledges the tail-strike problem but says it has addressed the matter in a variety of ways, including new software and better pilot-training programs. It says there hasn't been a serious MD-11 tail strike reported in the past year or so.
'Just Quit Flying' Veteran FedEx captain Jack Burke, who once walked away from an MD-11 tail strike, has described his caution about flying the plane. "The first 100 feet and the last 100 feet are where the crew really has to sweat it," he says. If the descent isn't exactly right, Capt. Burke adds, he will abort the landing, because "the plane can just quit flying on you. There is simply no time to recover."
Some pilots, reflecting the joking camaraderie of their ranks, have adopted macabre nicknames for the MD-11. "Death Star," some facetiously call it, according to the Air Line Pilots Association's safety-committee chairman. Others call it the Scud, after Iraq's unpredictable Gulf War missile.