RuAviation

Rosaviatsia has issued a special regulation in which it expressed concern about the increasing number of cases of aircraft fuselage touching runways, known as Tail Strike. This is stated in the bulletin on flight safety of Rosaviatsia, which was published by one of the territorial bodies of the agency.

The document notes that six such incidents were recorded in the first eight months of this year, one of which was serious. On 18 August, while landing at Sochi airport, a Smartavia B737 aircraft hit the lower part of its fuselage on the runway with an overload of 2.81g.

Statistics from recent years show that the 2024 anti-record is a repeat of the number of runway touches in 2019, while in 2022 and 2023 there were three such incidents per year. Boeing 737-800 aircraft had the highest number of runway touches with 15 incidents between 2010 and 2024, including seven serious incidents. As a rule, touches with the tail of the fuselage occur during take-off, landing or second-round departure.

An analysis of the causes of such incidents points to flight crew errors caused by individual peculiarities of piloting techniques and insufficient experience, the Rosaviatsia document says. As contributing factors, the agency singles out the inappropriate alignment of the aircraft stabilizer installation before takeoff, incorrect calculation of the speed of the front landing gear, unstabilised approach and continued descent instead of leaving for the second round, prolonged leveling and the desire to perform a very soft landing, improper parry separation from the runway or excessive rate of deviation of the helm during the departure for the second round, as well as side and gusty winds, wind shear near the ground.

In this connection, Rosaviatsia recommended airlines to check the extent to which instructor pilots pay attention to the correct methods of take-off, landing and circling during training and flight crew checks. It is also necessary to revise the flight data analysis programme to ensure that it takes into account actual data on events that endangered flight safety and eliminates contradictions in determining piloting technique indicators.