FedEx Express Flight 80

Cause

The Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) dispatched six investigators to the airport. The United States' National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a team to Japan to assist with the investigation. The crash was FedEx's second fatal accident involving a jet aircraft, following the loss of a FedEx owned B747-249F that crashed February 18, 1989, near Kuala Lumpur, while still painted in the Flying Tigers livery after the acquisition of the Flying Tiger Line by FedEx Express in December 1988. This was the first fatal accident at Narita Airport.

The accident was attributed by the JTSB to a series of "porpoising oscillations" that developed during touchdown, following a high sink rate during the final approach. The first officer executed a late flare, in which sink rate was not suppressed until the plane was nearly on the runway, but which also would minimize "float" that might carry the plane further down the runway and reduce its safe stopping distance, or carry it off the centerline in the existing crosswinds. This high touchdown sink rate, coupled with large nose-up inputs, caused the first bounce. A large nose-down input was applied, causing a touchdown on the nose gear. This deviates from approved procedures for the MD-11 during a bounce, which specifies the pilot is to hold a pitch angle of 7.5 deg and use thrust to adjust the descent rate. The plane bounced off this second touchdown, pitching upward. The large control inputs by the first officer resulted in a hard touchdown on the main landing gear. This final touchdown was hard enough (1200 ft/min) to cause the left wing to fail as the left main landing gear transferred force up into the wing, exceeding its design limit. The JTSB report suggested the fire might have been averted if the landing gear fuse pin had failed as designed, but that much of the touchdown force was horizontal to the pin rather than vertical, keeping it intact. The report also cited the crew's use of autothrottle during landing despite gusty wind conditions.

As a result of this accident the Japan Transport Safety Board published its final report on April 26, 2013, in which it made a number of new safety recommendations including that "in order to reduce the occurrence of MD-11 series airplanes' severe hard landing and bounce in which an overload is transferred to the MLGs and their supporting structure, the Boeing Company should improve the controllability and maneuver characteristics by improving the LSAS (Longitudinal Stability Augmentation System) functions, reducing the AGS (Auto Ground Spoilers) deployment delay time and other possible means. Possible improvement on LSAS functions may include: a function to limit large nose-down elevator input during touchdown phase, which is a common phenomenon in severe hard landing cases accompanied by structural destruction for MD-11; and a function to assist bounce recovery and go-around in case of bounce. In order to help pilots to conduct recovery operation from large bounces and judge the necessity of go-around, studies should be made to install a visual display and an aural warning system which show gear touchdown status on MD-11 series airplanes."

The investigation into the two pilots' performance during Flight 80 found that both exhibited signs of lack of sleep and fatigue, and the first officer was heard on the cockpit voice recorder talking about how he had not slept very much prior to operating the flight. A look at both pilots' activity in the days leading up to the flight found that, based on accounts from hotel staff, credit card transactions, and other signs of activity, neither pilot could have had more than four hours of consecutive sleep in the twenty-four hours leading up to the crash.

Additionally, the pilot flying, First Officer Anthony Pino, usually served as a relief pilot, taking control in the middle of long-haul flights. He therefore had little experience in landing the MD-11, and performed landings very infrequently.