Mexican tail-strike at Madrid Barajas

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Member for

15 years 1 month

Posts: 479

Apr 18, 2013 - 8:10 AM

The air traffic controllers in Madrid have described as ‘very serious’ an incident between two planes at Barajas airport last Tuesday.

It started when a plane from the Aeroméxico airline hit its tail on the runway because of a too steep a take off. Part of the tail came off with other parts of the fuselage which fell to the runway.

The air traffic controllers have criticised the Mexican crew for not sounding an alarm, or even not telling Barajas air traffic control that they had hit the runway. Apparently two of the crew was injured in the incident.

Later the plane had to return to Barajas with the crew only saying they were suffering a loss of pressure.

It was then, with the broken tail and fuselage and the two injured crew that the Spanish authorities finally discovered what had happened.

The runway was cleared of what has been described as ‘numerous fragments of metal of a large size’, but not before an Air Europe plane came into land and burst a tyre on its front wheels after hitting a piece of the wreckage.

The air traffic controllers across Spain say they fear that something like this can happen. They remember that it was a piece of metal on the runway which brought down Concorde at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in the year 2000, causing 113 deaths.

Picture of damage in the link below:

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/artman2/publish/madridnews/Very_serious_incident_at_Barajas_Airport.shtml

Original post

Member for

24 years 2 months

Posts: 2,886

This is a very serious matter. Always easy to assign blame in an incident such as this, but it would seem that this report is possibly accurate. This could easily have resulted in a major accident, with great loss of life. The outcome of the investigation will be very interesting. Fortunate that the Air Europe aircraft was able to complete its landing safely

Member for

11 years 8 months

Posts: 569

When I saw the attached picture my jaw literally dropped, I have never seen a tail strike that bad before! (Even the serious Emirates incident at MEL a few years back looks nothing but a mere scratch compared to this)

For the crew to report a 'loss of pressure' this would suggest they went above 10,000 feet? Which would also suggest they originally had no intention to return to the airport and had planned to continue regardless? If that's the case, this was sheer recklessness from the crew; whilst it's not uncommon for crews to only realise they've had a run-in with the tarmac on post-flight inspections at the arrival airport, I find it hard to believe that is the case here.

As MSR777 mentions, this could have been a lot worse.