United Air Lines Boeing 747-422 incident
Boeing 747-422 · Incident
From Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD) to San Francisco International Airport (KSFO)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA10WA056
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747-422
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N128UA
- Operator
- United Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD), SydneyTo San Francisco International Airport (KSFO), San Francisco, CA
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Not recorded
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Not recorded
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Sydney, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On May 7, 2010, at 1700 UTC a Boeing 747-400, N128UA, operated by United Airlines, experienced a tailstrike on departure from Sydney, Australia. The airplane had minor damage and returned to SYD and landed without injuries or futher incident. The incident is being investigated by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (www.atsb.gov.au).
Verbatim NTSB analysis from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA10WA056
- Event ID
- 20100507X70356
- Case number
- DCA10WA056
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c6257901ba9ab671d2f4fe6a5c7835e259d6e5e6aaeff73cc9e6a57afdf73697; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:01:25.463Z.