An Air France jet suffered a tail strike throughout a go round in Toronto, as flagged by The Aviation Herald. There’s even video footage from contained in the cabin.
Air France A350 has tail strike throughout go round
This incident occurred on Sunday, January 21, 2024, and includes Air France flight AF356 from Paris (CDG) to Toronto (YYZ). The flight was operated by an almost three-year-old Airbus A350-900 with the license plate F-HTYH.
The plane was making an attempt to land on runway 24L at 4:34PM, although the pilots determined to carry out a go round, which is a typical (and secure) process. Nonetheless, one thing clearly went very fallacious there, as a result of the jet suffered a tail strike throughout this maneuver. It’s not clear if the airplane simply didn’t have sufficient velocity, if the pilots elevated the pitch too shortly, or what.
A airplane spotter even captured the precise second of the tail strike, the place you possibly can see sparks coming from close to the tail.
Not solely that, however there’s video from contained in the cabin, the place you possibly can hear the tail strike.
Following the go round, the airplane made a sample across the airport, and ended up touchdown on the identical runway at 4:49PM. Thankfully there have been no accidents.
The Air France return flight was canceled
As you’d anticipate, the return flight to Paris was canceled, given the injury to the plane. The Airbus A350 stays on the bottom in Toronto. It’ll be fascinating to see how lengthy it takes for this plane to return to service.
Whereas tail strikes are problematic, they aren’t unusual, and so they can occur both throughout takeoff or touchdown. Whereas it’ll take some work to get this airplane mounted, hopefully there’s no main structural injury that make this a lot worse.
Based mostly on the images, this looks like one of many worse tail strikes we’ve seen in a while. Generally you’ll see a tail strike the place the tail simply barely drags on the runway, whereas on this case a good portion of the fuselage made contact with the runway. Hopefully an investigation is carried out into why this occurred, to stop an analogous prevalence sooner or later.
Backside line
An Air France Airbus A350 suffered a tail strike throughout a go round in Toronto yesterday. Whereas go arounds are widespread, they shouldn’t lead to tail strikes. Thankfully nobody was injured, and the airplane was in a position to land safely round quarter-hour later. Now the questions are how lengthy it’ll take to repair this airplane, and what the reason for this was.
What do you make of this Air France Airbus A350 incident?
