China Southern 787-9 Tail Strike on Landing at ZGGG

Posted by please_go_faster@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 22 comments

6.4 years Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, registered B-1243, received notable structural damage in a hard landing and tailstrike accident on runway 02 at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport during scheduled passenger service as China Southern Airlines Flight 3534 on Oct 21 (Per aviation safety network).

The damage looks pretty bad, consider 787's carbon fiber structure, will wait and see if it can go back to sky.

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p3nt4gon@reddit

10 months later...still not flying

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The-TDawg@reddit

They reported a “POSSIBLE tail strike”?! If only there was some evidence to prove one way or another, I guess we’ll never find out…

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ActionzheZ@reddit

I'm not sure why you are making it sound like the crew is trying to hide it. It's not like the crew can visually confirm while taxiing off the runway...The EICAS message is just a software logic triggered by certain parameters, the plane does not have physical means of knowing whether the rear end actually got scraped.

Crew saw the EICAS message, and asked the ground crew to check out the aircraft upon arrival per procedure. Unfortunately for the crew it's not a false positive.

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The-TDawg@reddit

Just a light hearted joke :-) My humor style is quite dry, I know they weren’t trying to (and couldn’t hide it), I can just imagine the ground crew reading the message then looking at this mess and thinking “hmmmmm… yeah I think you MIGHT have”

I imagine it was not the best of days for the flight crew when they saw it too, I feel for them

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escape_your_destiny@reddit

Actually it does have physical means of detecting tail strikes. There is a tail strike sensor at the rear of the fuselage. It's a 2" blade fin that has a 28V wire inside. It gets ground away during a tailstrike, interrupting the wire and triggering the tail strike EICAS message. The B777 has it also.

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ActionzheZ@reddit

Thanks for the info, TIL!

I always thought it was a software calculation based on angle where it expect the tail to contact the ground.

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BrtFrkwr@reddit

1.Ferry to Renton. 2. Drill off tail. 3. X-ray aft pressure bulkhead. 4. Repace belly skins. 5 Pay millions of dollars.

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Educational_Poet_577@reddit

Most likely ferry to Charleston where the 787’s are made

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BrtFrkwr@reddit

Charleston's an assembly line. Renton's the maintenance base.

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Rumpelforeskinn@reddit

Belly skins - I thought the 787 fuselage barrel sections were one piece items?

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BrtFrkwr@reddit

That'll make it more expensive yet. In fact, it may be more economical to part the airplane out.

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Public-Cat-9568@reddit

Ignorant comment here.. But with the time and cost of these repairs, it seems like building in a skid or small tail wheel could be helpful. Seems like it could prevent a lot of unnecessary drama. I bet the bean-counters have weighed this out.

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thesuperunknown@reddit

Well, at least the first part of your comment was correct…

No, a skid or tail wheel would not help with this. The problem with a tail strike isn’t just that some paint is scraped off, it’s that you’re subjecting the fuselage to forces that it’s not designed to endure.

The major concern with any tail strike is that it can compromise the aircraft’s pressure hull. If the pressure hull is compromised, this can result in rapid decompression that causes catastrophic structural damage. This has led to multiple deadly crashes. For example, in the case of JAL 123, failure of the pressure hull ripped off most of the empennage. The failure was subsequently found to have been caused by a bad repair to the pressure hull, which had been damaged by a tail strike seven years earlier.

This is exactly why tail strikes are such a big deal, and every single one requires a thorough and expensive inspection. Because if they’re not dealt with properly, they can create a ticking time bomb that can kill hundreds of people. Measures like skids and wheels can help mitigate the damage, but they don’t mean you can just skip the inspection.

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