Thats horrible. So many plane crashes lately. At least this only had packages in there and not passengers.
On the local TV station they showed footage of it sliding down the runway in a ball of flames. Horrible thing to happen but as Paulo said, luckily there were only two aboard. yakumo
Yes, that's in the BBC video ;-) What seems to have happened is that there was a warning issued about wind shear - basically rapidly changing crosswinds. In other words, they were advised not to land. My friend was on a later flight which got diverted I think to another airport, so I guess that it was possible to land. Why is it that, when this seems to be a common thing in that region, pilots still try to land? In America, there have only been two crashes due to wind shear since the bad one in 1982 thanks to better detection equipment - they were in 1985 and 1994. I remember another flight crashing somewhere in Asia fairly recently, though - and several planes had aborted landing due to wind shear that same day. It is a small blessing that it was not a passenger jet. Perhaps that's why they took the risk? Still, no consolation to the families. Yakumo, I hope you didn't have anything coming from Guangdong!
Well, it's been windy as fuck, that's for sure. From the bits of the video, I thought they were taking off. Was confused as I've never heard of wind shear as an issue in a take off.
concerning the latest news, the cause was a wind presure from right top down onto the airplane, which pushed it literally few meters down to the ground, where it then crashed.
The one on-line in the link above doesn't show the plane sliding for quite a long time though. It really do slide quite some way. No surprising really but what a sight. People on passing planes must have been in shock seeing that. No, but I did have feeling that the plane may have came from the US to China then to Japan. So I was wondering If my Mad World from ServiceGames was on it but not so since it arrived today. Yakumo
They were advised NOT to land. All planes got the same message with all apart from the FeDex one deciding to stay in the air.
Reminds me of a flight from London to Rome: The pilot announces they won't let them land at the destination airport but he smugly tells us (the passengers) "we know better... so we're going ahead anyway." 1 hour of circling around Rome later... "Well, they still won't give us permission so we're going to land at another airport."
I flew into Narita yesterday evening from Taipei, Taiwan and the flight was delayed (due to a late arriving plane) and when we did land, we taxied for over 15 minutes from the runway that was open to the unloading bay.
They cancelled all departing flights that day, so it's a bit of a fist-fuck around here. Many people bumped, having to stay for extra days, etc.
