On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii lifted off six minutes apart, the pilots each felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at the back of the cabin …
On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii lifted off six minutes apart, the pilots each felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at the back of the cabin heard a scraping noise.Both planes circled back immediately and landed again at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Tail strikes happen occasionally in aviation, but two in quick succession was not normal.
Last Tuesday, following a series of recent safety incidents and dangerous close calls around the U.S. aviation system, acting Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Billy Nolen wrote a “call to action” letter warning that the U.S. system’s stellar safety record mustn’t be taken for granted. It delivers a message to the cockpit with crucial weight and balance data, including how many people are on board, the jet’s empty and gross weight and the position of its center of gravity.
Flights to Hawaii are typically full, with lots of baggage and a full load of fuel for the trip across the ocean. The planes are heavy. Both the Max 9 and 737-900ER have long passenger cabins, which makes them more vulnerable to a tail strike when the nose comes up too soon. The fuselage under the tail of a jet has a bump on it called a “tail skid” that is designed to crumple and absorb impact. Still, maintenance technicians are required to inspect the damage, which is why the two planes immediately returned to the airport.
If the automatically loaded data strikes either pilot as not right, they can make a manual request for takeoff data from the airline operations center. “But 99.8% of the time, the data is accurate,” he said.The pilot at American Airlines said “requesting manual data is not standard” and that if there’s a glitch, naturally some pilot somewhere is going to miss it.
Peyton said his team also checked the integrity of the calculation itself before lifting the stoppage. All that was accomplished in 20 minutes.Peyton added that even though the update to the DynamicSource software had been tested over an extended period, the bug was missed because it only presented when many aircraft at the same time were using the system.Peyton said his first call that day was to the airline’s chief dispatcher to halt operations.
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