Watch a long airliner rotate on take-off and there is a moment when the nose is high, the main wheels are still on the concrete and the tail is only a metre or two above the runway. Rotate a little too fast, or a little too early, and that gap closes. The result is a tail strike: a scrape, a shower of sparks, sometimes nothing more than a painted skid plate ground away. Sometimes much more.

Tail strikes are in the news again after an IndiGo A321 scraped its tail at Bengaluru on 27 September 2026. They are rare, rarely dangerous in themselves, and almost always avoidable. Here is why they happen, which aircraft are most exposed, and why engineers take even a light scrape very seriously.

Geometry Is Everything

An airliner rotates around its main landing gear. The further the tail sits behind those wheels, the less nose-up pitch it takes before the tail meets the runway. That is why stretched versions of a type, the A321 rather than the A320, the 737-900 rather than the 737-700, the 777-300 rather than the 777-200, are the ones that most often carry tail skids and extra warnings.

Airbus puts it plainly in its Flight Operations Briefing Note on the subject: tail strikes can happen with any aircraft, but occur more often with long ones, because the risk is directly tied to pitch attitude versus aircraft geometry and to how far the main landing gear is extended.

Manufacturers actually go looking for tail strikes during certification. In the minimum unstick speed (Vmu) test, test pilots deliberately drag the tail along the runway on a protective skid to find the slowest speed at which the aircraft can lift off. It is one of the most spectacular sights in flight testing.

Why Take-Off Strikes Happen

A classic 1998 study published in Boeing's AERO magazine, based on an examination of tail strike events by the company's Douglas Products Division, found eight recurring risk factors. On take-off: a mis-trimmed stabiliser, rotation at the wrong speed, an excessive rotation rate and improper use of the flight director.

The most common root cause is wrong numbers. If the crew enters a take-off weight that is too low, the calculated rotation speed will be too low, and the jet will be asked to fly before it can. On 20 March 2009, Emirates Flight 407, an Airbus A340-500, struck its tail and scraped along the runway at Melbourne after a data-entry error in the take-off calculation. It only became airborne beyond the end of the runway and hit lights and an antenna before climbing away and returning to land. Nobody was hurt, but the Australian Transport Safety Bureau classed it as an accident.

Why Landing Strikes Happen

Airbus data from 2004 found that about 65% of reported tail strikes happen on landing, against about 25% on take-off. The Boeing study's landing risk factors were an unstabilised approach, holding off in the flare, mishandling crosswinds and over-rotating during a go-around.

The trap is the instinct to make a smooth touchdown. If the jet is slow, or sinking fast close to the ground, the natural reaction is to pull the nose up to cushion the landing. That raises the tail towards the runway at exactly the wrong moment. If the aircraft bounces, a second pull for a softer second touchdown is how many landing tail strikes happen. Airbus's guidance for a light bounce is to hold a normal landing attitude and never increase it.

Gusts make all of this harder. A sudden drop in wind speed during the flare steals airspeed, and the fix, more nose-up, again eats into tail clearance. That is the kind of condition IndiGo described at Bengaluru.

Why Engineers Worry About a Scrape

The damage from a tail strike is often hidden. The rear of the fuselage houses the aft pressure bulkhead, the dome that holds cabin pressure in. A strike can crack or distort it, and a crack that is not found, or not repaired correctly, can grow with every pressurisation cycle.

Aviation's two worst examples prove the point. Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crashed in 1985, killing 520 people, after its 747's bulkhead failed; investigators traced the failure to a faulty repair following a 1978 tail strike, which happened on the second touchdown after a bounce. China Airlines Flight 611 broke up in flight in 2002 because of fatigue cracks stemming from a 1980 tail strike that was not repaired according to Boeing's manuals.

That is why any aircraft suspected of a tail strike is grounded for inspection, and why modern types have tail skids, pitch limit indications on the primary flight display and synthetic "PITCH, PITCH" callouts. The goal is simple: keep the tail off the runway, and if it touches, find every crack before the jet flies again.

Sources: Airbus Flight Operations Briefing Note "Preventing Tailstrike at Landing"; Boeing AERO magazine No. 4 (1998); IATA Safety Risk Assessment "Aircraft Tail Strikes" (2023); Wikipedia and ATSB records on Emirates Flight 407, Japan Air Lines Flight 123 and China Airlines Flight 611.