American Airlines Two Planes Grounded After Tail Strikes
From Wall Street Journal, Jan. 20, 2011 page B4:
Two Planes Grounded After Tail Strikes
By ANDY PASZTOR
A recent spate of safety lapses by American Airlines, including a Boeing 757 that apparently took off at an unusually slow speed and slammed its tail on a California runway last week, are prompting concerns among federal safety officials as well as some of the carrier's pilots and mechanics.
None of the incidents resulted in injuries, though two planes suffered enough damage to warrant temporarily taking them out of service. An airline spokeswoman said "we take each incident very seriously," various internal reviews are under way to understand the causes, and American usually works together with labor and government officials "to make sure these types of incidents are mitigated."
She didn't provide details of what precipitated the operational problems.
Federal officials are conducting their own investigations into a number of incidents ranging from last week's takeoff error at Los Angeles International Airport to a botched landing in late December that resulted in a jet carrying 181 people running off the end of a snowy Jackson Hole, Wyo., runway.
The takeoff mistake in Los Angeles ended with the Hawaii-bound Boeing 757—piloted by a senior-management captain who is the chief pilot for 757 crews based in Los Angeles—quickly returning to the field. The aircraft may have suffered significant damage from what is called a "tail strike," which usually happens when the takeoff angle is too steep and the rear portion of a departing jet's underbelly hits or drags on the runway.
The heavily loaded Boeing 757 was taken out of service and may need repairs to its rear bulkhead, according to people familiar with the details.
The plane was ferried to American's Tulsa, Okla., maintenance base earlier this week, without passengers and under rules requiring the pilots to fly at lower altitudes in order to reduce structural stresses from pressurizing the fuselage.
A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said the agency is investigating the Los Angeles tail strike and safety experts are "assessing the extent of the damage to the bulkhead." The National Transportation Safety Board also has looked into the incident. Tail strikes occur from time to time, mostly on longer models such as Airbus A340 or Boeing 767 and 777 jets, but safety experts said they are particularly unusual during takeoffs of 757 jets.
Greg Smith, the management captain who was in command of the flight, didn't respond to questions, and the American spokeswoman said employees aren't authorized to speak to reporters.
In the past few weeks, the AMR Corp. unit also experienced a separate tail strike at Los Angeles Airport involving a Boeing 737 taking off for Canada. American said it didn't tell U.S. or Canadian investigators about the event because the damage wasn't significant enough to warrant such reports. The plane, however, remains out of service, pending a decision slated for next week by American's engineering and maintenance experts. At a minimum, according to people familiar with the matter, the aluminum skin around the plane's tail was damaged.
In early January, yet another American jet, this time a Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft, had to return to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport shortly after takeoff, when its nose gear wouldn't retract. After making a safe but overweight emergency landing, it turned out that mechanics had failed to remove a pin installed during overnight maintenance.
The New York incident has attracted attention from American pilots and mechanics because such pins have red-and-white streamers attached to them, reminding crews to "Remove Before Flight." None of the mechanics, baggage handlers or other ground staff noticed the pin prior to the plane's beginning its taxi for takeoff. The aircraft's pilots, who are responsible for visually checking the condition of every aircraft prior to flight, also missed the pin.
The American spokeswoman said the airline doesn't publicly "discuss corrective actions" affecting pilots.
At least three of American's recent incidents featured some unusual factors, and that's partly why they have sparked intense scrutiny from different groups.
The staff of the safety board, for example, appears especially interested in figuring out why the experienced captain in the Jackson Hole event failed to manually deploy panels on top of his jetliner's wings to help decelerate the speeding plane after touchdown. The panels failed to deploy automatically as the cockpit crew expected. Investigators are examining whether a maintenance mix-up contributed to that failure, and somehow also may have helped delay deployment of devices at the rear of the engines intended to slow the jet by reversing the direction of engine thrust.
Initially, the pilots of the Boeing 737 that scraped its tail climbing away from Los Angeles didn't realize anything unusual had happened. But during the flight, according to people familiar with the details, flight attendants alerted the cockpit crew that they had heard sounds of creaking metal after the jet's tail smacked the runway.
The Boeing 757 damaged during takeoff from Los Angeles may have been climbing at a speed of less than 120 miles an hour, according to people familiar with the details. That's markedly slower, these people said, than such a 110-ton jet typically would be flown in order to lift safely off the ground.
Write to Andy Pasztor at [email protected]
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