FedEx Express Flight 80
aviation accident
FedEx Express Flight 80 was a scheduled cargo flight from Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, China, to Narita International Airport, Japan, operated by FedEx Express. At 06:48 JST (UTC+09:00) on 23 March 2009, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 registered N526FE operating the flight crashed while attempting a landing on Runway 34L in gusty and highly variable weather conditions, including winds in excess of 40 knots (74 km/h). The aircraft became destabilized after the fatigued co-pilot's delayed start of the landing flare, subsequently exacerbated by his excessively large, nose-down inputs causing abrupt changes in the plane's pitch, increasing the speed and severity of repeated touchdowns during the bounced landing. This resulted in a structural failure of the landing gear and airframe, with the left wing detaching and power of the jet on the right wing thus causing the plane to roll. The plane came to a stop off of the runway, with the plane inverted and on fire. The captain and first officer, who were the only occupants, survived the initial crash. The airport's rescue crew got the pilots out of the aircraft and tried getting them to a hospital, but the crew succumbed to their injuries before they could receive medical attention.
Accident
The flight took off from Guangzhou at 02:06 CST (UTC+8:00) and was expected to arrive at Narita at 06:53 JST (UTC+9:00), a planned flight time of just under four hours. At 06:43:57, air traffic control informed the flight crew that a Boeing 747 had landed at 06:41 and reported wind shear of ±15 knots (28 km/h) below 2000 ft. Surface winds at the time of the accident were reported from 320° at 26 knots (30 mph; 48 km/h) gusting to 40 knots (46 mph; 74 km/h).
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This entry incorporates text from “FedEx Express Flight 80” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.