What happened
On June 20, 2012, an All Nippon Airways Boeing 767-300, registration JA610A, was performing a scheduled landing at Narita International Airport's Runway 16R. The aircraft, operating Flight 956 from Beijing, encountered a bounce during its landing attempt. Following the initial bounce, the aircraft experienced a heavy impact upon the touchdown of the nose landing gear. While the aircraft sustained substantial structural damage to the upper crown of the forward fuselage, there were no fires reported. Of the 193 people on board, including the crew and 183 passengers, four cabin attendants sustained minor injuries.
The investigation
The Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) conducted an investigation involving structural and kinetic analyses of the airframe. Investigators examined flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) data to reconstruct the flight path and crew actions. The investigation also included a detailed teardown of the nose landing gear and its wheels, as well as a fracture surface analysis of the damaged fuselage components conducted by the National Institute of Material Science.
Findings
Technical analysis revealed that the aircraft was operating in an unstable approach due to significant wind disturbances, specifically a crosswind with gusts associated with strong southwest winds. The investigation established that the aircraft's descent rate and pitch angle were significantly affected by these weather conditions.
Crucially, the investigation found that the captain did not recognize the aircraft had bounced. In an attempt to force an early touchdown of the nose gear, the pilot applied a nose-down control input. This maneuver, combined with the existing wind-induced instability, led to a high-speed impact of the nose landing gear against the runway. This sequence of events—the initial bounce followed by the aggressive nose-down correction—was the primary driver of the structural damage to the fuselage.