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Hard landing UL-266 flight recorder France-bound for reading
View(s):The cockpit voice recorder of a SriLankan Airlines A340 aircraft damaged while landing at Bandaranaike International Airport on July 2, was sent to the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) for reading, Civil Aviation Director General H.M.C. Nimalsiri said. The BEA is the French authority responsible for safety investigations into accidents or incidents in civil aviation. It has categorised the occurrence as a “serious incident”, based on initial assessments by SriLankan officials.
SriLankan Airlines flight UL 266 was returning from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when it experienced a tail strike incident, causing some damage to the tail section of the aircraft, while no injuries were reported, SriLankan Airlines said last week. The matter is now under investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of Sri Lanka, while the aircraft remains grounded, a statement from the airline said current.
The tail strike was caused, in technical terms, by a “high sink rate and flare followed by hard landing”. The aircraft itself is more than 19-years-old, with its maiden flight in 1994. It is reported to be one of the oldest A340s in service in Asia. The Sunday Times last week erroneously quoted CAA Chairman Gen. Rohan Daluwatte as saying initial investigations into the accident had indicated that a pilot error caused the incident. What he did state was that the incident was being probed.
Gen. Daluwatte said it was premature to comment on the cause or causes of the accident. SriLankan Airlines, too, said that it would be “speculative” to blame the tail strike on pilot error until the inquiry is completed. Mr Nimalsiri confirmed that the incident was serious, but that it could have been worse. On July 6, a tail strike suffered by an Asiana Airlines aircraft landing at San Francisco Airport, USA, started a fire onboard injuring more than 130 passengers and killing two. It is reportedly the first time a SriLankan Airlines aircraft has had a tail strike.
“We are primarily concerned with what really went on, with a view to rectifying the system,” Mr Nimalsiri said, of the investigation. “We must have an overall assessment. We may have completed one part, but that doesn’t give us the position to disclose the cause of the accident, because there might have been other things that also contributed.”
The Airline Pilots’ Guild of Sri Lanka said last week that the pilot had, in fact, done an auto-land on this particular flight. “We are required to conduct an auto-land every 45 days,” said Guild President Capt. Ruwan Vithanage. “It is a legal requirement tailored to keep current pilots to land in low visibility conditions. This pilot’s auto-land currency was expiring in two days, which was why he chose this option.”
However, the aircraft had sunk in the last 50 feet before touchdown. “This had caused the aircraft to have a low bounce, at which point the pilot-in-command had disconnected the auto-land and carried out a manual landing,” Capt. Vithanage reported. He said that, while a SriLankan aircraft had experienced a gear collapse in Chennai many years ago, there has never been an incident as serious as this before.
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