Aviation experts puzzled by RI airline accident
Aviation experts puzzled by RI airline accident
TOKYO (Reuter): Aviation experts said yesterday they were puzzled by the crash-landing of a DC-10 airliner only seconds after takeoff.
According to survivors who escaped from the blazing Indonesian Garuda plane, the craft lifted off a few meters into the air and then touched down again at the southern end of the runway with one or two shocks.
"This is not a regular overrun accident," said Kanichiro Kato, aeronautics professor at Tokyo University.
The aircraft, which was trying to take off from Fukuoka airport in southwest Japan, skidded off the runway over a road open to regular pedestrian and car traffic and came to a halt on a grassy buffer zone on the other side.
While it skidded, it veered sharply to the right, losing its landing gear and the two engines on the wings. A fierce fire gutted part of the aircraft.
"I heard a loud metallic scraping noise and then looked to see the wheel and other parts of the plane's landing gear shooting off along the ground away from the plane. Then flames shot upward," a middle-aged housewife living near the airport told Fuji Television.
Garuda Indonesia currently has six DC-10 planes in its fleet.
The DC-10 is powered by three engines, one on each wing and the third on the rear fin. The rear engine on the Garuda airliner had a unexplained gaping hole after the accident but was otherwise undamaged.
Since its debut in the mid-1970s, the McDonnell Douglas-built plane had been plagued by a series of crashes, but the problems were reported to have been solved by the following decade. The last DC-10 to be produced was in 1989.
Survivors said the fire started from the left-side engine either before or after impact.
"This kind of damage does not occur if the plane stays on the ground," said Kato.
"If it did leave the ground, there must have been some mechanical trouble," said aviation commentator Soichi Kaji.
The experts said that even if the left engine failed, the pilot should have been able to execute a takeoff.
"If the port engine failed or caught fire during takeoff, the pilot is trained to use the other two engines to attain a safe altitude. These planes are designed to be able to make a takeoff with just two engines," Kaji told Fuji Television. But he noted that it was much too early to say for certain what happened.
There was also nothing wrong with the weather. Conditions at the time of the accident, at noon, were fair with visibility at 25 kilometers and negligible winds.
Kaji and others noted that Fukuoka International Airport has a 2,800 meter runway, far short of the optimum 4,000 meters in most major international airports.
They said there was always the fear of engines sucking in birds, a problem that has caused crashes in the past at airports around the world.
The experts said the pilot avoided an even bigger disaster by halting the plane at the end of the buffer zone, avoiding what would have been an even more devastating crash into houses beyond the zone.
"It was at least lucky that the plane stopped in no-man's land," Kaji said.