i wonder how much this incident was caused by the landing gear and what is the contribution of the miserable runway

Love the caption for the photo in this article:

Looks like a stabilized approach for normal landing and touchdown with malfunctioning landing gear causing them to head off into the weeds. Doesn't look like a crash to me.

I have no examples, but this is the standard, more than the exception. They rush and the first thing done is painting over of the logos (often the unique branding stripes/colors too).

I'll lend you my glasses! :D

Not in my experience.

Several people, even just on this thread, have recalled just such happening as procedure, not as an isolated incident.


I will edit and post more as I find them

http://www.addictlab.com/home/projec...ne?groupid=136

In fairness, there really wasn't anything left to cover up on the Asiana flight. The tail was already gone and much of the fuselage burned. And they did move the plane relatively quickly to somewhere that was less visible to most of the airport.

Also for people questioning about covering up the plane, how many planes survive a crash in good enough shape that there's much left to cover up? Fortunately there aren't too many that crash and then only a small subset of those still have the logo intact after the crash. That might be why you don't see this that often but as others have noted, it isn't unusual.

That logo covering happened pretty quickly.

One would think that after preservation of life has been accomplished / achieved, the next step would be securing of the scene for the appropriate accident investigation to take place.

Allowing a representative through the scene would not be a normal Accident Investigation practice. They'd have to be observed and monitored to prevent the alteration and destruction of evidence.

Here are some other examples:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...h-painted.html
http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/...airlines-.html
http://www.airliners.net/photo/0193315/M/

Yes, I agree that it is a fairly standard procedure to "de-identify" the aircraft after an incident like this. justhere makes some excellent points. I might also add that in the case of Asiana at SFO, that's an airport where Asiana is fairly obscure; one departure/day. It's a bit of a different situation when the downed plane is at your hub (or main base) airport where you are the dominant carrier. And where you also have more personnel and equipment on hand to execute this procedure quickly.

Unfortunately, the "coverup" was done so ineptly that they shot themselves in the foot. Look at the photographs. It is so blatantly obvious, it looks like the photo itself was doctored. If they had used white paint for the name on the fuselage and some purple paint on the tail, would anybody be talking about this now? Surely they must have a few cans of paint in the THAI maintenance facilities at Suvarnabhumi?

It becomes a bigger fiasco that snowballed out of control because after that "magic marker" attempt to hide the name and logo, THAI was not prepared to answer questions about them. Right up to their president.

In reading about this incident, I first read THAI deflecting, saying it's a Star Alliance rule. Then Star Alliance tweets out that the THAI spokesman must be mis-informed, as they don't have a rule about this. Then, in the Bangkok Post article linked below, the THAI president "defended the airport's decision to obscure the THAI logo on the damaged aircraft as normal procedure." My first thought is "Why would the airport do this? And if so, I would think it would only be at the direction of THAI. Then again, being the flag carrier of Thailand, maybe government and political interference were involved, and somebody outside of THAI made a hasty decision that left THAI to deal with the fallout?

You can bet there will be some meetings, not only at THAI, but at quite a few other airline managements, about how not to handle a situation like this in the future.

Bangkok Post article 9/9/2013 quoting THAI president Sorajak:
Flight delays at Suvarnabhumi, landing gear blamed for crash

CNN article 9/9/2013 with photo of "de-identified" plane:
Airline blacks out logos on plane after runway accident

Since years I have to "enjoy" the A300-600 on my feeders CNX-BKK-CNX. Next month for the first time it was rumored I will be on some more sophisticated ship. Guess which?

It may just be us older FTers. And technology may be a reason why it's not done as often these days.

I seem to remember this happening a lot, long ago. The idea, IIRC, was that it was only effective if they got the logo erased before the first picture hit the media.

With google, online news, camera phones, and social media these days. I gather that there's not much of a point anymore.

I guess just by remembering, I'm showing my age. 5555

Did they not have enough paint to cover the entire livery? :D