Last week when a JetBlue Airbus A320 took off Yampa Valley Regional (near the Steamboat Springs ski resort) in Colorado headed for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, there was a smaller plane approaching to land in the opposite direction on a collision course.
Today, a passenger aboard that plane, Joe Cangiano, who said he was seated in seat 19D recounted the experience and shared exclusive photos with Plane & Pilot of the damage to the tail.
The tail appears to be badly damaged, but it might not be as bad as it appears. That section of the A320 is a complicated junction of curved and flat intersecting components, and the reflections created there can resemble distortion when there is none. That said, the photos do seem to indicate substantial damage to the tail section. An A320 expert wasn’t sure the photos showed damage at all, saying that tail strikes usually result in damage to the bottom of the tail section. In fact, when we spoke to him the next day, he was nearly certain that the photo showed no damage, and shared with Plane & Pilot other photos of A320s that looked to have damage in that same section but were in pristine condition.
But no one is denying that the tail did in fact hit very hard. Cangiano wrote, “I was on that plane that received the incredible jolt. At the time, Not sure if it was a deer or a pot hole until the pilot got on the Intercom telling us of the precautious situation.” He expressed his displeasure at the circumstances. “I don’t understand why they circled Hayden airport and then diverted the plane to Denver instead of landing back in Hayden,” and added, “It was the biggest jolt I’ve ever experienced on a plane,” adding that he felt as though the actions of Jet Blue “put lives in jeopardy.” He also observed that the “pilot sounded nervous on intercom and was white as a ghost after landing in Denver.”
The tail strike, which the NTSB is calling an “accident,” could have been far worse. It could, in fact, have been a horrifying collision between the two planes, probably on the runway. But as the A320 lifted off, its rate of rotation was so sharp that it hit its tail on the surface of the runway, a jarring strike that was captured by a passenger on cell phone video. An expert on the A320 we reached out to thought there was no way the pilots could have missed it happening. The plane made a sharp turn shortly after it lifted off, presumably to avoid the landing traffic.
The crew, once they were informed by ground personnel that there had been a tail strike, made the decision to reposition to Denver International. It’s not clear in what order things happened, but ultimately, the crew climbed the plane to 31,000 feet, which Plane & Pilot has learned is not contraindicated in the plane’s emergency operations section of the handbook. It, instead, indicates that the crew fly low and unpressurized, in case the pressure vessel was compromised in the tail strike. The thought is, if the pressure vessel is damaged, pressurizing the plane could cause a catastrophic structural failure, and the crew, for obvious reasons, has no idea how bad the damage from the tail strike is. Again, the flight from Yampa to DIA proceeded without incident.
Yampa Valley, which has major airline service to numerous locations around the United States, servicing ski tourists this time of year, is an uncontrolled field, which means, as pilots are well aware, that the aircraft going in and out make their own call on how to enter or depart the traffic pattern around the airport. And they communicate their intentions on a common frequency, referred to as the Unicom, assigned to that airport. Speculation is focusing on whether the departing Airbus, seeing the approaching King Air, which is reported to have been at 900 feet AGL as the Airbus was rotating, expedited the rotation to avoid the oncoming traffic and hit the tail. While there’s no confirmation that this is what happened, the NTSB will surely be taking a close look at it.
Upon landing uneventfully, crews inspected the plane and found what the NTSB is calling serious damage. No telling at this point if it was structurally compromising damage, which can be a tough call to make, but it’s concerning, nonetheless.
Back to the departure. As the A320 was on the takeoff roll on Runway 10, another airplane, a much smaller twin turboprop Beechcraft King Air, was coming in to land on the same strip of asphalt but in the opposite direction—which would be called Runway 28—just remember that it’s not a separate piece of real estate, just the same strip of runway landing in the opposite, oncoming direction.
Why this could have happened will also be looked at by the NTSB and the FAA. Even though Yampa Valley is an uncontrolled field, there is radar coverage down the ground, so Denver Center controllers would have known where the King and Airbus were. The Airbus had almost certainly been released for takeoff, and the King Air, while probably talking to other traffic at Yampa, would have been on the radar scope for the Center controller, at least normally. How did the King not see an airliner taking off on the opposite-direction runway? Why did the Airbus not see the King Air as it was approaching? It should have been visible to the pilots on the Airbus’ collision avoidance system. And why did controllers release the Airbus for departure with conflicting traffic? Finally, was that traffic a factor in the tail strike, and why did the pilots climb the plane to its usual, pressurization-required altitude on their way to the diversion airport in Denver?
Investigators will have plenty to keep them busy with this one.
