Incident: JAL Doraemon Jet scrapped its ass

Japan Airlines' (JAL) Doraemon Jet got into an incident at Itami on May 9th. It scraped its tail skid assembly when the pilots decided to go around.

The Boeing 777-300 involved in the incident was registered as JA8941, aka the JAL Doraemon Jet, was performing flight JL2016 from Sapporo to Itami. There were 371 people onboard when the pilots tried to land at Itami at around 19:10. The pilots decided to abort the landing and go around due to unstable wind condition. That's when the tail of the plane scrapped the runway. The ATC closed the Itami runway for 30 minutes. The plane left a 20m by 15cm scrape mark of on the runway. The plane landed safely 45 minutes later and no one was injured.

As a result, two flights from Haneda and Akita were diverted to Kansai and a flight to Fukuoka was canceled. Roughly 470 passengers were affected.

There is only one configuration for JAL's 777-300 and it has 500 seats (78J 422Y). Therefore the load factor was about 70% which isn't bad at all. The average load factor for May 2009 was only at 65.6% but of course it could be better (2008's number was 88.4%).

Sources:
Japanese: TBS news
English: Aviation Herald
Traditional Chinese: Ming Pao News

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