I searched this board and could not find news of this accident when one of AA's "newer" MD-80s was totaled in a DFW maintenance accident on August 5, 2012. I heard about this as AA has now decided to remove this plane from its active fleet. The aircraft, N110HM built in 1989, originally saw service with Korean Air for about a year, then came to AA from TWA. It had 57949 hours and 35928 cycles on the airframe, and probably would have been used by AA for up to another 5 years. In the URL below, 3 pictures demonstrate that the aircraft was sitting on a tail jack (? 737 jack) in a hangar, and somehow the tail jack penetrated the cabin when the nose elevated. Does anyone know why this happened?
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Great pictures on the pprune thread. I hadn't heard anything about this. Should be plenty of MDs that could be brought back from ROW or the desert if AA wanted another ship to backfill for this one that will be on its way to the cutters torch.
As a 1989 plane though I doubt this is one of AA's newest MD-80s. The very last MD-80 went to TW around 2000 if memory serves. I usually try and check the builders plate upon boarding and it seems to me that there are a bunch of "native" AA -82s or -83s with early 1990s build dates.
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A cursory glance of the AA roster of MD-80s shows that there are about 140 that are newer than the former Korean Air/China Eastern N110HM. At more than 23 years old, I'm not going to shed a tear for it. Not a lot of cycles or hours.
Now if it had been a relatively new 738, like the one destroyed at KIN a couple years ago (flight 331) . . .
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Regardless of no tears shed over the loss, it's still an ominous looking photo.
Does anyone know - Is this sort of thing human error, or does it appear that the plane was physically compromised and that caused the it to be susceptible?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BillBauman
Does anyone know - Is this sort of thing human error, or does it appear that the plane was physically compromised and that caused the it to be susceptible?
A cursory glance of the AA roster of MD-80s shows that there are about 140 that are newer than the former Korean Air/China Eastern N110HM. At more than 23 years old, I'm not going to shed a tear for it. Not a lot of cycles or hours.
Now if it had been a relatively new 738, like the one destroyed at KIN a couple years ago (flight 331) . . .
However, all MD-80 aircraft purchased new by AA have many more hours on their airframe than this plane. For example, the 4 newest AA aircraft are mid-1992 vintage and they have flown more (have more total time on their airframe) than N110HM. Only almost all of the former TW aircraft are "newer" in terms of total time than the any of the AA MD-80s, and AA has been sending some of these back to the leasing companies every year. Some of the AA purchased MD-83s are pushing 80,000 hours.
The skin and APU air bypass duct should be fairly easy to repair. What isn't---based on where the jack punctured---is the pressure bulkhead. Even a scratch on that would knock it out of commission.
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I would imagine it wouldn't take much to total an airframe with so little resale value... Presumably with this type of damage the engines are still in good working order, leaving an airframe worth very little even if it were undamaged. If I were a betting man I'd wager that it'd get ferried to a boneyard, be stripped of its engines and live out its remaining days waiting for the scrapper.
