Word: tails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cannot be flown without its entire tail fin, which helps stabilize the big craft, and can be flown only with great difficulty without the attached rudder, which is moved to alter the plane's heading, or horizontal direction. The pilot can vary the thrust of the engines and use ailerons, hinged sections of the plane's wings, to maintain altitude and make turns, although directional control is difficult...
...when the craft is on the ground and the engines are not producing this power. The unit is also a backup for the surface controls, like the rudder, in flight. Some experts theorized last week that as the auxiliary system disintegrated it might have ruptured hydraulic lines in the tail, which, in turn, could have affected the aircraft's main controls...
Pilots gave high praise to Captain Takahama for keeping his stricken 747 in the air for at least 32 minutes after the tail damage was sustained over Sagami Bay. "In spite of such terrible conditions, the plane was kept aloft by engine thrust only," said Mitsuo Nakano, JAL's deputy chief of 747 pilots. "That is an incredible performance." A U.S. expert, Captain Homer Mouden of the Flight Safety Foundation in Arlington, Va., agreed. "The crew exhibited great courage and skill in trying to keep it sea flying," he said. But the odds loose," a United Air Lines pilot said...
...week went on, the experts' suspicions were also directed at the aircraft's rear bulkhead, an aluminum-alloy partition that separates the pressurized cabin from the non pressurized tail assembly. Hiroshi Fujiwara, deputy investigator for the Ministry of Transport, said that the bulkhead was found at the crash site and that it had been "peeled like a tangerine." It was possible, he said, that if the partition had cracked in flight, the air rushing from the cabin could have had enough force to dislodge the hollow tail fin. American experts theorized that the large number of takeoffs and landings, each...
...part of the history of JA8119 (the plane's serial number) particularly attracted the probers' attention. On June 2, 1978, the aircraft approached a landing at Osaka with its nose too high. The tail and the rear part of the fuselage slammed into the tarmac at 320 m.p.h.; the impact ripped aluminum skin panels from the belly of the plane. JA8119 was grounded for a month while Boeing engineers supervised repairs that included replacement of the lower part of the rear fuselage...